I recently purchased a Steam Deck for my parents, hoping that it would be an easy to use gaming machine for the occasional times when my parents want to game. The promise of the Steam Deck was that it would be an easy to use gaming machine like a gaming console, but for PC games. Instead, I've found the Steam Deck to be like DOS-era gaming where I have to spend huge amounts of time doing configuration and setup, and afterwards, everything is still sort of fiddly and difficult to use.
In the end, I now realize that the Steam Deck is not actually for PC gaming. It can play PC games, but the hardware and software have been specifically designed as a new gaming console designed specifically to play Steam Deck games for Steam Deck gamers. What I mean by that, is that the Steam Deck isn't really designed for more general gamers, and it really isn't really designed for non-Steam Deck games. I had a whole library of old Steam games that I've accumulated through Humble Bundles and elsewhere over the years, and I assumed that they would work okay on the Steam Deck. In fact, the experience of playing these games on the Steam Deck isn't that great. The Steam Deck is designed for playing Steam Deck games--games that have been customized and programmed specifically for running on the Steam Deck. If you have a lot of those games, then that's great. I think those are mostly action-oriented games, especially if they have been ported from other gaming consoles. The Steam Deck is also not designed for casual gamers. To use the Steam Deck, you have to learn a bunch of UI quirks and memorize several shortcuts. Non-tech-savvy people will never remember all these things and will become frustrated by the device. A lot of fit and polish issues needed for a general audience are lacking. For example, just turning on the device is a little complicated. There's a one or two second delay between pressing the power button and anything showing up on the screen. So when I press the button, I can never figure out whether the press was registered, and whether I should press the button again, which might turn it off, or long-press it to actually turn it on or whatever (a lot of other UI actions have long delays with insufficient feedback like that too--I'm looking at you, "return to game mode"). And when it does finish booting up, it dumps you on a non-customizable "home" screen, which doesn't actually list the games that you can play on your device. Instead, it lists a jumble of games that you recently purchased on Steam, some that you've played recently, etc. You have to press an unmarked shortcut (the B button) or navigate through the Steam menu to get to the games list, and then you have to navigate around that to get to your list of installed games. There's no way my parents or young kids will remember all those steps to get to their favorite game. You would think that this convoluted UI is a scheme to get you to buy more Steam games, but that's not the case either because you have to navigate the menus to get to the Steam store as well. I just don't understand why the UI is this way.
I've watched several videos about how the Steam Deck can be used as a computer. In fact, it only makes a suitable computer if you plug in a monitor and mouse and keyboard. The Steam Deck designers did not bother refining that aspect of the experience to make it practical if you're using just the Steam Deck itself. For example, I'm not sure if the hardware digitizer is poor quality or the touch drivers are poor, but all touchscreen actions are pretty janky. Swiping to scroll in web browsers and elsewhere doesn't really work smoothly. The virtual touch keyboard always misses key presses, so you can't really type quickly using it. I'm not sure if the soft keyboard is part of the OS or if it's a Steam thing because in some programs, the program loses keyboard focus when I'm in the virtual keyboard, which is annoying. There's no dedicated button to pull up the soft keyboard. Instead, you need to use the Steam-X shortcut, which normal people won't remember. That shortcut is also a hassle because it requires two hands to press (a good portable device should be usable one-handed), and I often end up accidentally pressing the grip buttons on the back of the device when I have to shift my hands over. When using the trackpad like a mouse, the R2 trigger is used for left-click, and the L2 trigger is used for right-click, which is going to throw beginners off. Also, the L2 and R2 triggers are analog triggers, so it's a pain having to squeeze them all the way down just to do a mouse-click. In particular, double-clicking is a real pain, and sometimes, I have to shift my hand a bit to fully depress the trigger, causing my thumb to shift on the trackpad a bit, moving my mouse pointer before clicking. Personally, I think R1 for left-click, and R2 for right-click might have been better. You can install your own programs and games, but Steam discourages that, requiring you to add 4 different pieces of artwork in 3 different locations to get your own programs to integrate nicely with the Steam interface.
Playing games that aren't optimized for the Steam Deck isn't too great too. Part of the problem is that the device is optimized for Steam Deck games at the expense of being good for general PC gaming. For example, besides the keyboard being janky, the Steam Deck doesn't have enough buttons for it to act like both a mouse and a game controller at the same time. With non-Steam PC games, there's an assumption that even if you have a gamepad, you might sometimes have to click on things or type things to configure things. But the Steam Deck can't be configured as both. You have to go into a mouse mode to do your mouse things, then switch back to controller mode to do your controller things. And there's no button for doing that switch, so you have to navigate menus or whatever every time you need to switch. If the Steam Deck were designed for general PC gaming, they would have lost one of the trackpads and had a dedicated left-click/right-click mouse buttons, plus a keyboard button. That way, you could do easily switch between mouse/gamepad/keyboard for non-Steam Deck games without much hassle. Instead, the games need to be customized specifically for Steam Deck to work well.
I still think the Steam Deck is a nice device, but a lot of the hype oversells what it is. It's not easy to use like a gaming console at all. It isn't great at general PC gaming, and you aren't going to pull out your old collection of Steam strategy games or whatever to play on it. It's not a general computer. You aren't even going to browse the web with it. I think there's still a lot of room for other manufacturers like GPD, AYN etc. to make better devices that are easier to use and better for gaming.
