[Discussion] How has the Steam Deck changed your habits with playing video games?

The switch did.

All handheld, all the time.

The steam deck means it's less painful, and I can play more complicated games. My switch is basically untouched since.

I've been playing more single player games. My PC has mostly been for multiplayer stuff with friends - Siege, Deep Rock etc. My Deck has opened up time to a load of Single Player things - AAA things like Spiderman, Control, Mad Max and indie stuff like Black Skylands.

Plus I had a load of work travel in the first part of this year. The Deck made hotel rooms much more pleasant!

I work from home 3 days a week. I have a decent battlestation, 5800X and RX6700 with a 38" widescreen and homebuilt ergosplit on a sit-stand desk. During work hours I use a KVM so I can use my work laptop with my setup.

When I built it out, I wasn't prepared for how little I would want to game at that desk.

The only gaming I did since I built that PC was sitting on my couch with an old Steam Link and Steam Controller. It didn't matter that the screen wasn't as good or that I had to timeshare the TV with the rest of the family. It was a change of scenery that let me leave work behind.

Since getting a Steam Deck, I've finished more games than I have in years. Not only can I game away from my desk, I can hang out with the rest of the family without disturbing them. And if someone needs my attention, I can put it to sleep without worrying about save points or load times.

I've installed games on the deck that I thought were interesting but I wasn't in a rush to play right away. And instead of those games getting forgotten I ended up actually playing them.

For me it is quite awesome to be able to play a game on my PC, and take the Deck with me and continue the game on-the-go, then pick back up on PC, without losing progress. It’s pretty seamless.

Also, if I’m just downstairs from my PC, or outside, I can stream from PC to Deck and enjoy reduced battery consumption and faster loading times. I think the graphics look much better too, but that may be optimistic-colored shades.

It's made my Steam collection viable again. I had to box up the PC when we had our second kid, and with it went 400+ games. The Deck has totally gotten me back into that ecosystem again, which is surely what Valve want.

On a personal level it's totally killed my Switch off (Nintendo exclusives aside). I also find myself playing most of my games on the 'Deck right now, because having the flexibility is apparently something I really enjoy.

Games are same and playtime is same. Linux gamer even before steam deck.

My neck is more often sore.

i don't have a steam deck but now i play on my pc with linux instead of windows lmao

My first machine was a commodore 64, then Nes, SNES, Master system, Megadrive, N64, OG Xbox then Stopped gaming after the Xbox 360 end of life. Don't have time to get setup in front of a TV or monitor or the inclination.

The switch came out and I got a chance of one cheap. Bought it loved that I could pick it up put it down and lock it so it was exactly where I left the game last time. BOTW was great played Skyrim again then got bored of the gimmick games with not many adult titles and Nintendo's poor updates. And the joycons are completely shit.

The switch languished in a drawer for ages then I gave it to my 7 year old nephew.

I heard about the deck taking preorders so got my name down.

As someone who primarily plays 5 year or older RPGs it is an absolute dream machine. I can play it at work when I'm quiet, I can play it with the TV on in the background, I can lie in bed with it.

Put it this way if I broke the deck right now I'd go out and buy another tomorrow.

I really hope there will be updates to get starfield playable.

I will never go back to consoles that aren't handheld again.

I am a father of young children. Prior to my deck, I would be just too tired by the time the kids were asleep to go downstairs in my basement and play on my desktop. That just led to me playing games maybe once a week on the weekend.

Now that I have a deck, I can kick my feet up on the couch and play for an hour or two before bed.

Because of the deck I actually am able to make time to play games. Without the deck I just skip games altogether during the week.

I was on a decade-and-a-half gaming hiatus (job, kids, the usual) until we got the Nintendo Switch early in the pandemic (and it was a saviour for the whole family). When the Steam Deck was announced, I hesitated a day or two (this probably pushed me three to four months in the delivery queue), but eventually realized that this is the device I've been waiting for my whole life (a Linux-based gaming hand held which can also be used as a general purpose computer) and ordered it. I had a dormant Steam account with only Civilization V in it (my wife got it for me on DVD when it came out, and that's when I made the account). Since then, I bought >200 games and >100 DLCs (I started playing some of the lighter ones on my under-powered Linux laptop before the Deck arrived and continued on the Deck using cloud saves), finished multiple games, and felt sleep depraved for months.

Currently, me and my wife are playing Divinity 2 in split screen mode on the big TV. I also use the Deck for online courses, responding to emails, writing documents, surfing, etc. I created a desktop controls binding for handheld desktop mode usage which allows me to change zoom and brightness, bring up the keyboard easily, copy and paste, open the start menu, alt-tab between windows and go in and out of full screen mode etc. all with one or two motions of the controls. For example, I mapped swiping up and down on the left touchpad to mouse wheel up and down, and swiping left and right on it to SHIFT+mouse wheel up and down, allowing me to scroll in all directions using my left thumb. This allows me to use it for reading illustrated books where I need to zoom in and out and scroll across the page.

Steam Deck is a game changer in so many ways.

I take over the TV less on weekdays when I need me time after work. Means more time with my wife so it's a win.

• Not really, but what device I play on has changed, more Deck now than main gaming PC.
• I play more indie games and single player games now. More emulated games like my old GBA ones mostly.
• Mostly same times, late lol. But around the house far more because of the portability.
• I play much more casually now. Less sweaty competition online, more zone out & chill games.

I play so many more platformers and 2-d bullet hells. I never enjoyed the latency of a wireless controller, or the inaccuracy of wasd inputs, and wired controllers are a pretty big no no in my house (we love our animals more than our electronics, but electronic loss is so hard to handle), the steam deck is great with most games native controller support, and the community layouts make most non natively supported games work wonderfully.

I just wish it had a built in kick stand, I bought a little stand for it but the deck is just a bit too heavy when it's almost vertical.

I'm playing a whole lot more GameCube games again

I went from buying and never playing PC games to playing them pretty often.

My gaming PC is in the basement. I rarely find the time to hole up down there with kids and family life. But I can hang in the living room on my couch and play now. Game changer.

I’ve played my Steam Deck exactly once since I bought it when it first released.

I’ve started playing PC games again! Previously I’d lock myself away in my gaming room at my PC and my partner and cats would never see me, so I stopped doing that. Now I can sit on the couch with them and game while we watch a show together. I also play games on my lunch at work, being able to play Starfield during downtime has been a dream come true.

I do a lot of flying and travel for work and the Steam Deck has been fantastic for it. My gaming laptop can't draw sufficient wattage from the airplane's power outlets so I couldn't use it for gaming in flight, so I needed another solution that wasn't gaming on my phone (let's face it, most mobile games suck).

The Steam Deck gives me that extra versatility when traveling. I find myself playing games that I wouldn't otherwise normally play due to the control scheme. I'm mainly a keyboard and mouse user so adapting to a controller for most things was a bit of a learning curve, but it's much easier when playing games well suited for it (Ace Combat 7, American Truck Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator 2, FEZ). My favorite though so far has been Grim Fandango Remastered. The controls are so intuitive that it's like the game was custom made for the Deck (despite the original being two decades old).

I haven't really played FPS even though there's a gyroscopic control scheme available, I miss the precision that the mouse enables. Hack and slash in TES 4 Oblivion works well though, but not really with bow and arrow shooting.

I also couldn't really do RTS for the same reason, even with the track pad like functionality.

It's great though for side scrollers, isometric RPGs, third person action adventure games, driving games, and simulators.

I only bought the Steam Deck so I could play Windows games without having to give money to Microsoft, or pirate Windows. I'd much rather play games on macOS, but unfortunately, there are way too many games that don't run on macOS (or used to run, but don't anymore).

Now that Apple has their own Windows compatibility layer in the form of the Game Porting Toolkit, I don't use my Steam Deck as much as I did.

I've been playing on planes, airports, beach, outdoor.

But not much at home. There I still use the PC.

I play way more retro games due to packages like EmuDeck being so slick.

Ironically enough, it's led to me playing more games on the living room television! The steam deck helped me adapt to playing with a gamepad, as opposed to mouse and keyboard.

Until they come out with a Steam Controller 2, I will say the best gamepad for steam is the Dualsense (a Dualshock 4 also works). It's got one touchpad instead of two, but Steam lets you map the left and right half separately, which covers my primary use cases. I also installed the RISE4 remap kit, a hardware mod that adds paddles on the back of the controller which can mimic any face button. Not as good as having actual new buttons, but it does mean I can run and jump without taking my thumb off the right stick.

It's made me sometimes wish I had one when I was playing games.