4mo ago

Steam Deck Won’t Survive 2025 Without A Significant Upgrade. - (Original clickbait headline and not my opinion!)

www.forbes.com Steam Deck Won’t Survive 2025 Without A Significant Upgrade

When it launched in 2022, Valve's Steam Deck was peerless. Less than 3 years later, the competition is poised to leapfrog it. What can Valve do to stay relevant?

I personally have a huge backlog of games I'm happily playing through on the deck. And, having been burnt a few times (Cyberpunk, No Mans Sky ..), I very rarely buy new full priced games anyway (better to wait for a discount and some patches!)

But according to this rather clickbate article ...

In the last month alone, we’ve seen three disappointing examples of games that are too demanding for the Deck. Star Wars Outlaws is unplayable on Low settings, even with FSR set to “Ultra Performance.” Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 can’t reach a steady 30fps at the lowest quality setting. And based on the demo, Final Fantasy 16 is unplayable without FSR and Frame Generation, and afflicted with stuttering and horrible frame pacing with those scaling features enabled.

47 comments

IMO that's more of a problem with the industry not really caring to support lower specs, or generally not seeing the deck as a real console or platform to target. People still make Switch games and the damn thing was already outdated at launch and they even underclocked it for good measures.
At 800p you've got to start thinking, is most of the detail those games compute even actually visible the on screen? How many PCs does that make obsolete? If the deck can't run it at 800p, even at 1080p you're gonna need what, an RTX 2060 for the lowest settings on a PC?
Some of the example titles don't even sound like they're the kind of titles that are made to showcase what your 4090 can do, which logically you'd want as many people as possible to be able to play it.
- It's not even about the lower specs, it's the optimization in general.
  My PC is a little old, but still fine for most games up to medium settings.
  But when I tried FF XVI, which is mentioned in the article, I couldn't get anything close to acceptable performance with everything turned as low as possible and looking like shit.
  
  Too be fair. We all now what kind of a trainwreck the ffxiv source code probably is, thanks to the 1.0 -> 2.0 recode. Your point still stands tho
- I agree with you, handheld can never compete with a desktop when it comes to raw power. So, if companies don't consider it as a platform to target for, you'll always have problem with latest games. Maybe not at launch, but you can't upgrade a handheld "console" every year or two.
  That's the good thing about consoles, you buy it, and you know (most of) the games that come to the platform will just run on it.
  I don't have a SteamDeck so not sure how it works, but maybe they should make a sub-store for SteamDeck, that only has games that are verified to run on it. They can still have an option to search and download game from full steam store, but it should come as a warning that these games aren't specifically made / optimized for Deck.
  Just thinking out loud. Don't actually know what SteamDeck owners really want. :-)
  
  That is how it sort of works the steam store displays the games the games that work with the deck. You can install other games but you get the a warning that either it has not been testet enough to make sure that it works, or that it is not recommend because that issues with the deck.
  
  I think, that the steam deck is popular enough, so that it can be treated as a console, were you make special “ports” of your game, which has it default settings adjusted for that console (and maybe some other patches to make stuff work)
  But maybe this is just wishful thinking 🤔

They never pretended it was going to run literally everything. It's a handheld.
The fact that there are still very few games it can't run (excluding the publishers actively blocking Linux) is impressive, but it was always expected that some games would leave it behind.
Hell, the whole reason for "deck verified" is because their default assumption is that a game won't work.

Easy solution - I just wont be buying games the deck cant run.
Optimise your games for lower end hardware. Problem solved.
- The steam deck was lower end hardware when it came out. It's natural for it to lose support right about now.

Just taking a look at Steam Deck Top 100 tells me 2025 won't be a problem lmao
- This. To make the claim in the title is to not get what steam deck is about.

Lol this is an article about how shit optimization has been for the last several AAA game releases. Even quite capable desktops often have performance issues with the mentioned games, because the PC ports weren't optimized enough and/or tested on a wide enough range of hardware. It's a real shame, many of them don't even look significantly better than the last generation or two. It's just graphical bloat as devs get lazier and lazier the beefier the GPUs get.
- I agree, however I think the main cause is studios/publishers just deciding where to allocate the time. Devs are just the ones implementing these shitty decisions.

Still the only handheld PC that doesn't come with a dogshit OS and an abysmal battery life. The deck doesn't do well despite its low specs and alternative OS, it does well because of them.
- The fact that the OS is replaceable sealed the deal for me. Then the marketing page is claiming they will make parts available for DIY repairs? Incredible.
  If I am being honest, I prefer the Switch form factor with the dumb little controllers. I like it so much that I could maybe accept its lesser performance. But it is locked down, centralized store, some subscription bullshit...
  I've found a Steam Deck fits really comfortably in the hands. I can settle for having an additional wireless controller to play it from afar.
  
  The fact that the OS is replaceable sealed the deal for me.
  And the default OS isn't locked down and doesn't try to prevent you from doing other stuff with it. What you want to do isn't in the Steam interface? Switch over to desktop mode and you have full access to the underlying OS.
  My only complaint with the Steamdeck is that I find using the touchpad on the right side for long gaming sessions hurts my hands. I 3d printed some grips which help; but, I think my hands just don't like the orientation. Still love my deck though.
  
  I find the switch controllers to be absolute torture for anything more than like 20 minutes.
  
  If I am being honest, I prefer the Switch form factor with the dumb little controllers
  Android phone + Telescopic gamepad + winlator might be what you want...
  (Or you can use one of the switch emulators on android...)

It seems like the writing is leaning on being negative.
"These 2 games don't work, even with FSR"
Okay, legitimate issue.
"This game doesn't without FSR"
That's what FSR is for, and now you don't want to use it. This isn't an issue.

Oh, go figure. I thought a Steam Deck was a handheld device running off of a battery. Yeah, if you've got a desktop computer with a high-wattage GPU you'd expect better performance on the latest AAA graphics, huh? Weird. Cannot possibly be worthwhile to own, I guess.

OMG two games don't work! How many others do? O yea that's right, thousands...the library for the deck is magnitudes larger than pretty much every console out there...hell I'll say it, every console released has smaller libraries than the deck.

Ok but outlaws sucks so who gives a fuck about that and not everyone wants to play big AAA games like these.
- Right? Some of us buy no AAA games and don’t even kinda care it can’t run them

If you got a deck and expected it to run the latest AAA titles, you are an idiot.

Personally, I just don't have time or energy to play big AAA games for the most part. I very much prefer smaller indie games nowadays, and Steam Deck has those in spades. I would wager a lot of older gamers are in the same boat.

In 2027 the current iteration won't be legally able to be sold in the EU, since the EU will require portable devices to have easily replaceable batteries. (Which the Steam does not qualify for due to needing a heat gun). So an upgrade is almost certainly planned by then.

I don't own a Steam Deck. I am a Linux gamer, and I appreciate that it exists.
Internally it's basically a laptop using its AMD integrated graphics, yeah? No discrete GPU? Which makes it actually pretty impressive at what it does.
- It has an APU but the graphics component is quite a bit more powerful than your average laptop.

The only thing cooler than a living miracle of portable computing is an undead miracle of portable computing that I'd still be playing games on come 2025 🧛

I do think it's about time for a successor. But that didn't mean the current Steam deck isn't viable any more. There are still thousands of games it will happily play. And the others can probably be made to run with some TLC from the developers.

I mostly use the Deck for indie games and emulation so a CPU/GPU upgrade isn't something of interest for me. A larger, 16:9 screen or better ergonomics on the other hand...

Do they care to explain the pathetically underpowered, slow, and clunky Switch? We'll wait.
- i mean it is eight years old.
  
  It was crap at release.
- They did.

🤷 I've mostly used it for MAME anyway.

Yeah well my steam deck will survive 2025 unless I break it. It's a proper nifty little machine, so glad I bought it. I've not done any gaming since i had a PS2 so there's loads of games to catch up on. Recently finished bioshock, wow. I've got a long list of older games, but I've tried a couple of newer things. It plays doom 2016 just fine, same with deathloop and beam ng drive

Will the switch 2 outperform the steam deck? Because if not, games will continue to be made to run on lower hardware.

I don’t understand how Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky were the ones that “burned” you, they’re both great games? GOTY material even?
- They both had a lot of issues at launch
  
  Every game has issues at launch, that’s why they launch them

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