I love mine and once my win 10 stops working I will be using it as my main computer as well

I love mine. I bought one as soon as they went on sale and it has completely replaced my gaming laptop when I travel. What I like most of all is that it makes it easy for me to play games in my backlog that I would not otherwise have plaid. I have almost 900 games in my library and it’s opened up my playtime in platformers, casual story games, puzzle games, racing, space sims, and more. The fact that I can do that on a plane or wherever on holiday is awesome. I have no doubt that there are games in my library it can’t play, but I’ve not actually tried to play a game on it that just didn’t work.

If you aren’t a gamer I don’t know how much value there is for you. If you want to become a gamer it’s a well balanced device with a solid store behind it and your library will be accessible by any PC you buy in the future. If you are considering it as a gift for a gamer, just keep in mind if they aren’t primarily a PC gamer (that is to say they play on a console) they will have to rebuy some games if they want to play on the deck.

As far as being a full laptop replacement, I wouldn’t bother.

Love mine too! I held off until the oled refresh. I’m going to continuously get the latest version now that I’m totally convinced it’s the most superior gaming format.

Its no 4090 ti but it ain’t trying to be and it’s only going to get better. I’ve been playing through my backlog and everything I chuck at it runs amazing.

The funny thing is that we started buying MORE games after getting it and filtering steam for the ones that work best.

It completely replaced the Nintendo Switch as our party platform, we have been adding piles of local multi player games to it and using multiple Xbox controllers with it docked around the main TV most of the time.

I think when it comes to how many titles work it is going to depend on your gaming preferences. If you play a lot of EA games or Ubisoft games it is clunky to get their store loaders going sometimes or at a min you get prompted to sign in via onscreen keyboard which is a PITA sometimes and there is lower support.

Steam native games however are great.

I bought my OLED deck a few months ago, and whatever the opposite of buyer’s remorse is, that’s what I have. I love it more every day and I think the ideal Personal Media Device. I travel a lot and I have tons of games, movies, and even ebooks on the device which completely changes the complexion of long flights for me.

It’s so customizable and versatile.

Best device I’ve ever owned and still working fine after 2 years.

Amazing. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

It’s rare for me to see games in my library that are not supported, although there are a few. But there is a difference between running and running well. Demanding games will get maybe an hour of battery life and the fans will be pretty loud the whole time. Some games (especially strategy games) really work better with a full keyboard and a higher resolution screen. Some games I just would not want to play on a handheld. But most of the time the games that I want to play work well.

One trick I use to get better battery life and performance is streaming. I use Chiaki to stream from my PS4, and Steam Link (as a non-steam app lol) to stream from my desktop. It’s often worth it for the fan noise reduction alone.

It’s even better at emulation. It’s a great machine for PS2 and GameCube games- I have the back buttons and track pads mapped to speed up, pause, slow, and rewind gameplay and to control save states. I have not dialed it in yet, but I think with some tweaking you could probably use the gyro and/or track pads to do some good Wii emulation. 3DS and DS are great too, mostly because of the track pads. Anything older emulates fine, but isn’t as impressive.

I have gotten PS3 and Switch emulation to work, but the fans go on and the battery life goes down, so I don’t really use it for that. Plus storage is a bit tight and PS3 games are huge.

It does feel like Valve was just a little too early. I wish the screen was 1080p.

The 2230 SSD’s that it uses were kind of uncommon when it released. The weird size made them more expensive and they had lower capacities. I managed to get a 512GB one, but I wish I could have gotten like 2TB. It seems like that’s changing now though. Similarly, I wish microSD cards came in larger capacities. Storage just seems to get used up so fast these days.

I love my steam deck and it is blue the only machine I use to game. I even use it as my desktop computer when I plug it into my monitors with a usbc hub.

Is a pretty decent machine.

I travel quite a bit for work, so for me it’s a life saver.

I play some pretty demanding games such as Cyberpunk, Elden Ring and Horizon: Zero Dawn, and while it’s no PS5, they run beautifully for such a small device.

The battery is not going to run me any of those games for more than an hour or so, but for that there are always those oldeis but goodies I emulate from NES all the way to PS2.

If like you say you’re not a gamer, which makes me assume you’ll play some games just to pass some time and kill some stress, I don’t think you can find a better device to spend a couple of hundreds on and feel like it was a gift.

I have a gaming PC with an R7 5800X and an RTX 3080 hooked up to a 38” Ultrawide monitor

Since I got my Steam Deck, the PC setup mostly collects dust. Being able to lay on the couch and play games while watching TV shows with my SO became a lot more appealing than going into another room to sit upright at a desk. Games in bed while watching Saturday morning cartoons? Yes please!

As far as games are concerned, the majority of things run at acceptable framerates. For the exceptions, you can always stream from a PC over the network and the battery life is incredible when you play that way. This also applies to games with restrictive anti-cheat.

Its really great. I can only recommend.

Excellent. Simply excellent. Don’t expect it to run AAA games at 60fps, but it’ll run most very well. Doom and Doom Eternal can hit 60fps easily. Even Baldurs Gate does a decent 30fps. For the portability and convenience you can’t lose. Don’t forget it hooks up to a TV, Bluetooth controller, or a keyboard and mouse! I’ve gamed at work in lunch break using a USB-C adaptor for screen, mouse and keyboard and it works great.

A lot work, but some of those are with an asterisk.

E.g., dyson sphere program, a factory game, is listed as playable. But, there’s no steam cross-play - so you can have the same save file on your PC and deck. And that game is computation heavy so I doubt if it would work well. Or Fez: I tried launching a few different ways, but it hard crashed. I’m sure there’s some way to fix it, but I didn’t bother to find out.

All that being said, I haven’t touched my gaming PC in months because the pause / resume feature is so convenient for getting gaming in, 15 minutes at a time.

I love mine. I have a pc i havnt used for gaming in years because its in another room. Bought a steam deck, now i get to play all my pc games on the couch

It’s great for offline, singleplayer games. Unfortunately some multiplayer games just refuse to work on Linux, because of the anti-cheat. But I mostly use my Steam Deck when I’m traveling and have a very poor or no internet connection, so I can only play singleplayer games anyway.