u/morgan_423 — morgan423

I think that a combination of several things (like less than ideal performance per dollar value for the SM, and the cost of PC components continuing to rapidly climb while SM remains on a who-knows-how-long wait list) pushed quite a few people to other alternatives.

I don't think all of the regional queues are as low as about a month like OP, but they're probably all a little shorter than expected.

Which makes me sad. I love mine and wish that everyone had one.

They lost me at that price point, sadly. And I was really looking forward to this thing launching.

Valve makes damn good products, I'm rocking a Steam Deck and a SC in my personal collection, and love them both.

But my next PC upgrade was looking to be just that... a power upgrade. That was the main focus.

The small form factor, the excellent presentation, and the Valve quality that we all know this is going to have... they would have been nice. But right now I'm looking for equal or better than SM performance regardless of form factor, and I have my sights set on several possible options to get that, all of which are at least a couple of hundred dollars cheaper. Sorry Gabe.

To save you time, Nested Desktop can effectively get you into Desktop stuff much more quickly than the standard reboot-to-Desktop sequence.

That is an older post, but all of this still works *exactly* the same way now as it did then.

It is and always has been fantastic.

I tend to play stuff in clean, crisp native 720p on my 1440p monitor (with the perfect 4x integer scaling), most commonly using mouse and keyboard... but some games I play with the Deck controls (I have an extra-long docking cord going to the Deck for that purpose). Have a SC reserved, and will just use that instead once I order it.

Eventually I'm going to do power upgrade and get a true 1440 PC... but even though it'll no longer be docked, I'll still be happily streaming to my Deck in multiple relax spots in the house.

Steam Deck OLED is awesome. Fantastic screen, excellent controls, insane ergonomics, light for long play sessions... even now, with older internal hardware and lessening power versus new games, it's still the best stream-to-around-the-house device on the market, and it's not really close.

But I can't see it still being $789 / $949 USD awesome. My guess is that Valve has decided that they aren't going to run out of Steam Decks again and have priced these accordingly.

Same here. I was through the sequence and trying to buy by no later than maybe 1:00:10, and tried three different payment methods, all to no avail. I don't think we had a chance on this go-round.

...And the site just updated to Out of Stock. Grats to those of you who managed to get a payment jammed through.

Have received "There seems to have been an error initializing or updating your transaction. Please wait a minute and try again or contact support for assistance." on all attempts, all payment methods. Looks like it'll just be fried for a minute.

I think a lot of us are eventually going to upgrade to stronger systems (steam machine or something else), but it's going to be a long freaking time in that scenario before I stop streaming to my Deck when I'm home. It's just the king of comfy, kicked back on the couch or bed gaming.

I mean, if you just absolutely had to play a Linux-hating kernel anti cheat game, then install a small-as-possible partition for Windows, dual boot, and stay in Steam OS every single moment you're doing anything else but that game.

But most Windows-on-a-Steam-Deck people I've encountered just drive Windows all the time. I will never understand.

I haven't encountered this, but it's rare that I'm in actual desktop mode. Normally I'm using a flavor of Nested Desktop.

Not picking it up myself, but definitely hope that you enjoy it.

NGL, the whole FEX-compatibility thing that'll let you also play non-VR games on it with a normal controller is kind of neat, though I have no idea of how it will perform vs Steam Deck / Steam Machine / other starter PC.

If I were in a situation where I didn't have normal displays everywhere, I'd consider it as a traditional AR solution.

That seems a bit high high to me; if they want to move them in significant quantities, I'd think they'd need to try to land in the $80 USD range, give or take a hair.

They have quite a few other controller options out there that they are competing against, and even though it's awesome, they definitely could potentially price people off of it.

Wouldn't surprise me if there's also a "depletion of LCD screen stock and/or 7nm APU stock" ingredient in the Doesn't Make Sense Anymore soup as well.

I have a M & K available, and play docked a fair percentage of the time, but when I'm docked, I still prefer the console controls over M & K for BG3.

Much more streamlined, the intractable UI is not as busy, and the whole game is much cleaner-looking (95% of what you're looking at is the game world when you have no UI elements calledup... whereas the M&K UI are taking up a chunk of screen real estate all the time).

I don't have a problem, I can stop gaming any time I want!


This row of games is 92% of my playtime, there were a bunch of other games from my collection but I only played them briefly here and there.


100% Deck, it's currently my only PC.

No issues yet, but I'm docked and using M&K or external controller probably 85% of the time or so.

I plan to keep my Deck as my stream-to around the rest of house device far into the future (read: until it disintegrates, the ergonomics and form factor are *that good*), even after my next upgrade to the Steam Machine or similar option, so I will be Hall-replacing the sticks if / when they start to drift.

Finally taking a break from *BG3*, though that will probably only last until I have a SM sitting in my comfy gaming zone.

Still heavily playing *Deep Rock Galactic* with friends, *Streets of Rogue* has entered my short-time gaming rotation, and I just picked up *WH40K: DarkTide* on the recent sale.

I haven't heard many people talking about a key group here.

There are quite a few people out there who play the Deck handheld 95% of the time, so they rarely dock it... but they also aren't out and about traveling with it.

They just play it in comfy spots around their house, without ever really hooking it up to a larger screen extendedly. There are probably quite a few of them talking in this thread.

For any of these people wanting a performance upgrade: Steam Machine is going to be HUGE, and much better than switching to a slightly more powerful handheld at nearly the same price point.

These people can hook the SM up to a TV to check on it alone if needed... but primarily they will locally stream from it to their Decks. And it'll absolutely crush 60/70/90 FPS (the common max display rates on the Deck screens, depending on what flavor you have and whether or not you're overclocking the LCD display) at 800p, with graphics cranked WAY up on a ton of games.

It'll definitely be a fantastic era to be a household Deck gamer.