If your like me and have been following the seemingly now gone backlash, controversy, and misinformation regarding the Nintendo Switch 2, odds are you've seen some online goobers on the twitter machine propping up the Steam Deck as if its either competition to the switch or a viable way to get past the Switch 2.

To absolutely nobody's surprise, the outrage was just temporary and people bought the switch 2 despite all the preaching. As for me, I figured I'd humor the Steam Deck and buy it just to see if any of the online gossip about it being as good as a console is true.

And to save you the trouble of going any further, I will just say no. I don't recommend this over an OG switch and especially if your planning on buying a Switch 2.

For starters, the price point of an entry level Steam Deck LCD is 399.99 and that's just for the handheld alone, getting the dock with this thing will run you 79.99 basically putting you just shy of the Switch 2s MSRP.

Mind you, the switch 2 will come with everything you need to get started.

The other problem I have is that the Steam Deck is sold on this promise of being seamless like a console, bare that in mind with what I'm about to tell you next because that seamless experience got smashed to smithereens in basically my first hour.

I unboxed the Steam Deck and turned it on, and I immediately had to go to trouble shooting it on Reddit as for whatever reason the Steam Deck is very picky about what kind of Internet connection you have when going through your first time setup, I had to get a bit of progress, steam deck would fail, I would turn on the Wi-Fi, get a bit more of progress, steam deck would fail, rinse and repeat this trouble shooting for almost an hour. I even let it use my phone's Wi-Fi as a hotspot and it still failed to finish until I restarted it one more time and it let me through, one hour of rage at this 400 dollar product.


Contrast this to my Switch OLED or even an Xbox, they'll just ask you for your Internet connection, get you setup with an account, do some updates, and your off and running.


This also applies to a brand new micro SD card that I was trying to format. Steam wouldn't recognize it and I had to troubleshoot through a help forum on Reddit, works now though.

Again going back to my switch for a moment, I just plug the micro SD card inside the system and it works.

The last and final nail in the coffin for the Steam Deck is the fact it's running on Steam OS, now while many will tout this for the fact that it's basically making everything run better than it would on Windows it has its caveats. Steam has a list of compatibility for just about every title and even they're not always correct on their listings.

A game like Sonic Adventure DX runs flawlessly and it's not supported. A game like Dragonball Xenoverse 2 is fully functional despite it saying that the deunvo anti cheat drm isn't configured to support the steam deck. GTA V will only enable the single player campaign and will not allow online. Finally there's more recent titles like Spider-Man 2 which appears to be just overall too demanding for the deck to run smoothly.

This is the opposite of what you'd want in a seamless console experience, and because it's Steam OS Valve will continually have to get games to modify their settings or DRM in order for it to run on the deck.

Contrast this to the switch which regularly got flack for not having ports of their favorite games, but at the end of the day if I buy a game on the switch, there's comfort knowing it's going to work out of the box unless it's something really unoptimized like the Batman Arkham games.


Getting an original switch is more seamless than a steam deck is what I'm getting at here.

Yes your buying a PC handheld, but if it's touting a seamless console experience it shouldn't be making me check through compatibility or having me scrambling over to reddit sub forums just to troubleshoot through its problems and for these 3 reasons I can't recommend the deck at present.



I do still own mine and I'll probably still use it, but it is not the switch 2 alternative anyone makes it out to be.

Dang I was kinda hyped for the deck too but hearing about all that headache just to get it working is brutal lol. I like messing around with PC stuff but if I'm dropping $400 I dont wanna be on reddit for an hour trying to get wifi working. The Switch might be underpowered but at least I can just pop in a cart and play, no fuss. Feels like these PC handhelds still gotta long way to go before they can really replace a console for me.

I can understand this perspective, though I haven't had many of the issues you've had. Didn't have any major issues with Wi-Fi connectivity with any network I've tried it with, never had issues formatting microSD cards, etc. For me, all those things were a "it just works" solution.

You talked about compatibility ratings, which do potentially need some work, but these things make sense. Anti-cheat is sadly something that's out of Valve's hands: a lot of it is kernel-level, and that's something that's practically impossible to fake through a compatibility layer. Those kinds of anti-cheats won't even allow virtual machines, and it's all the fault of the ones in control of those games who won't update it to support Steam Deck and other platforms. Denuvo isn't even an anti-cheat, it's a DRM measure that Proton, and thus the Steam Deck, have been able to support and utilize just fine for years. Games being marked as "unsupported" that are playable are a thing as well - usually, this means they were originally tested in the past when they legitimately weren't compatible, or there's specific things that didn't work properly. One example is Final Fantasy 9, which had a launcher that behaved badly in Game Mode on the first launch - it performed perfectly fine in Desktop Mode, and would never pop up again after the first launch, but that was enough to make it "Unsupported". Same with One Way Heroics, where the ancient MIDI music wasn't supported at first, but everything else in the game worked fine.

I think the strength of the Steam Deck is that it's a PC that's capable of utilizing not only Steam but also pretty much anything else you could get running on a Linux PC. You can browse the web with it, something you infamously can't do with a Switch, install whatever you want on it, stream from it, run emulators, and play all kinds of things that never have and never will be ported to any console. As well, even if a game is "unsupported", there are often ways to make things work. Plus, it still gives the seamless console experience when I want it to - I can pretty much just use it in "Game Mode" the same way I'd use a Switch or other console and it works perfectly fine. Hopefully this all makes sense from the perspective I'm posting from?

(I will say I'm not a big fan of the Switch 2 or the things they've done with it, but I'm just not buying it and sticking with my Deck because my Deck does what I want it to do.)