You can’t even buy a decent graphics card for the Steam Deck price. That’s the state of PC gaming in 2022; a hobby with such an expensive entry requirement right now that those with no serious disposable income need not apply. Even if you could find a PC for the same price as Valve’s new handheld, I can guarantee it wouldn’t come with a discrete GPU today, and I can also guarantee you’d be sorely disappointed trying to play any game on this side. from 2006.
But Steam Deck will even play Elden Ring at a decent pace, as well as anything I can play that PC port stuttering at the moment, and have had impressive gaming performance in almost every game I’ve thrown at it. Sure, you have to be a bit sparing with the graphics settings, maybe give it a frame rate cap if you want something like playable battery life, and it only runs at 1280 x 800, but it’s a gaming PC. who can play and be yours for only $529.
If you’re willing to wait, that is.
Yes, the thorny issue with any praise of the Steam Deck is the fact that availability is quite limited and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. No one on the PC Gamer team that booked day one has had any inkling that they are any closer to getting their hands on the micromachine.
Gabe himself has told us that he has no visibility into when players will be able to want a Deck, click buy, and receive one in a few days or a week. There is some good news though in that Valve designer Lawrence Yang has gone on record that he believes Steam Deck production will ramp up rapidly and hit the hundreds of thousands in its second month on sale. Fingers crossed, that means Valve will take care of those pre-orders pretty quickly.
But looking past those hopefully temporary issues, the hardware itself does a lot of good things. Its potential as a budget gaming PC is immense, more than just a cheap laptop with low-spec integrated graphics, which will likely cost more than a mid-tier Steam Deck.
And forget trying to build a desktop PC with vaguely capable gaming skills for anything close to the price of the platform. Especially since the highest-end integrated graphics from AMD or Intel are always tied to more expensive CPUs.
With Steam Deck, you can play games on your PC on the go, in the garden, at a bar, on your couch, or at your desk, connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It’s incredibly versatile, portable, and surprisingly powerful; a PC that can be almost anything to anyone. And you can get all of that for just over $500. Less if you opt for the 64GB version and fill it with micro SD cards.
There are, of course, limitations. The Linux operating system is incredibly accessible, whether in Deck’s simple, handheld-focused user interface or on the desktop, but is It’s still Linux and has a bit of a learning curve. And while Proton is doing a fantastic job of getting Windows exclusive games to run on the Deck’s OS, some don’t work and some are deliberately not supported.
We already know that two of the biggest games, Fortnite and Destiny 2, don’t support SteamOS, so you’ll need to be running Windows (or stream via GeForce Now) to play on the Deck. And right now, AMD is still tinkering with Windows drivers for the Van Gogh-based Aerith APU at the heart of the device, so you can’t install Microsoft’s OS there just yet.
Although these are not deal breakers, certainly in terms of PC gaming at such an aggressive price.
At a time when the barrier to entry for PC gaming is sky-high, with the price of graphics cards still at a downright offensive level, and just about everything else has a demand-related premium price attached, for the Steam Deck to come as such, a value proposition actually seems almost anachronistic.
But that was always part of the plan for the Deck.
“We always thought price point was one of the critical things,” Gabe tells us. “So, I mean, from the very beginning, we were guided by a set of ergonomic considerations, by performance considerations, and by price.”
However, that in itself was difficult.
“One of the main challenges we thought we had to deal with with this generation was price,” says Gabe. “The price of $399 was set in stone. And we had to do a bunch of things, like make massive minimum commitments [minimum order commitments]and other types of things to get to the volumes that would allow us to reach those kinds of price points.”
However, the fact that most early adopters pre-ordered the premium 512GB version has caught Valve by surprise.
“I think we were a little surprised that instead of the entry-level SKU being the most popular,” says Gabe, “it was the high-end SKU that ended up being the most popular SKU.”
“A lot of us, including myself,” echoes designer Greg Coomer, “didn’t predict that when we were wrapping up the process and getting ready to announce the Steam Deck. We predicted the opposite.”
Those are those pre-order reservists though. When the system becomes more widely available, and parents are shopping for great birthday and Christmas gifts, you can bet the lower tier Deck will start to make sense. It’s the kind of situation we’ve seen with Xbox Series X being the big seller up front and Series S coming out later.
And, despite only having 64GB of eMMC storage inside, the cheaper Steam Deck still retains all the other features and specs of its bigger brothers. Granted, you might miss out on the top-tier etched glass display, but you do get 16GB of LPDDR5 and an APU that can crush God of War at an eminently playable frame rate.
During my tests, whenever I ran into a small bug or performance that gave me pause, I always went back to the price. The Steam Deck is a third of the cost of many other gaming laptops and is much cheaper than most gaming laptops. And that’s why price has been such an important consideration for Valve, and why you shouldn’t even consider spending more than you’d expect on an eBay listing for a second, no matter how much you want to.
This is, at heart, a brilliant budget gaming PC.