Steam deck worth it6/18/2023 ![]() In general, I think we’ve had a tendency to prioritize console games over PC games at IGN – and I believe it’s time for us to rethink that a bit. Valve has seemingly sold a lot of these things, and given it topped the Steam charts for over 30 weeks (it has certainly sold over a million units, and no doubt many more than that) I'm curious whether it’s at the point yet that it’s starting to change our relationships with our Steam libraries. That brings me to why I bring the whole subject up to start with. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition appears to have bounced between multiple different statuses even in the short time I’ve had a Deck, but the whole trilogy has always been perfectly playable. There’s a classification for games that notes them as “playable” which feels like it should be crowd-sourced rather than just relying on Valve’s internal testers, and a game’s status on the system can change without any kind of notification. Steam telling you a game is “unsupported” doesn’t always actually mean that – so you end up hunting through Reddit to find out what’s up, or just downloading the game and trying it. Honestly, my biggest peeve has been Valve’s aggressively-conservative listings for games that run properly on the thing. I am mostly happy to forgive the thing for its relentless wonkiness: like the fact that you can’t download anything without leaving the screen on or that the fan just mysteriously roars to life for no discernible reason when the device isn’t really doing anything or that it’s battery life is wholly unpredictable. ![]() It’s still very clearly a work in progress, and I don’t think we’ll ever know with 100% certainty whether games will run as reliably as they do on a PlayStation or Xbox, but in the two months I’ve had this thing it has become my favorite system, my near-constant companion, and the device I’ve almost exclusively played games on. It’s now nearly a year since the Deck launched, and Valve has shipped more than 100 updates that have made the device more dependable, stable, and…well, let’s be kind and call it predictable. ![]()
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