I said it elsewhere, but it’s almost like they looked at the market research showing Steam PC gamers would buy a gazillion Steam Controller 2s or Steam Deck Controllers if they made and sold either one, or both.
And then they decided to make something that was neither one of those things. It’s totally bizarre.
Why would anyone buy this? You can already do this streaming through the Deck or any of the other handhelds, if Game Pass is your thing.
The story is in the fact that they’re even asking.
I’d probably say no from your replies below to people, OP. The screen alone isn’t worth several hundred dollars, and your main concern about portable gaming length seems addressable by an external battery pack and the carrying solution to include it with your Deck out and about for several hundred dollars cheaper.
Really it feels like you’re asking, is it worth spending all that extra cash to make your portable rig gaming setup less bulky when you’re gaming away from home. For me, the answer would be no and I’d put up with the slightly bulkier set up with the battery pack, and I feel like most people would be at the same place, but I don’t know your exact specific circumstances.
I… don’t think that’s a thing that works on Lemmy.
You’d have to like the aesthetic to really want that version I think. Not sure if it was visually everyone’s cup of thirty-extra-dollars tea.
Sorry friend, Valve absolutely cratered the resale value of LCD Decks with the OLED launch and restructuring.
I was considering selling my Deck and moving to the Go in the days before the announcement, and the very day I decided to sell, Valve put out that press release. Instantly new LCD Decks were $150ish cheaper, so that just comes right off the top of what you could get for a used one.
The only thing worse than scalpers are people who buy from scalpers and perpetuate the cycle of scalping.
Honestly, Google did this to themselves with not properly vetting the advertisers that they sell space to, and with oversaturation of ads.
If they’d have stopped granting ad space to scammers and malware spreaders, and if they’d have stopped adding advertisements at the line most people find tolerable (which seems to be a single ad between videos… not multiple at a time, and certainly no mid-rolls), they wouldn’t have triggered quite the level of ad blocking that they did.
I see this “problem” that they have as being entirely of their own making.
Be sure to check community control layouts, and not just the default.
I’ve had several games I thought would be terrible on a controller, only to discover someone had invented an ingenious and intuitive layout already.
It’s hard to get steam into tablespoons. I was really impressed.
Feel your pain. I’m constantly thinking, what the hell do I have to do to get r/orioles to follow me over to Lemmy to grow the numbers? They are one of the only things left at Reddit that I regularly look at. But 99% of the mod and user base there just doesn’t care about the the issue.
Conversely, that means that at least sports spaces are among the least bot-spammed places on Reddit. So there’s that.
Please definitely don’t be discouraged in the slightest, TPM.
Single-game forums were almost always the smallest gaming subreddits on Reddit, often times being several orders of magnitude smaller than the “gaming in general” communities.
But that special feeling of having other people passionate about that specific game you love can’t be beat. Hang in there, and you’ll definitely grow and get that engagement in time.
Others here have probably mentioned it, but I’ve heard the Deck is fantastic in situations where you use a main powerhouse PC to run a game (especially at the Deck’s resolution of 800p), then stream it through your local network to the Deck.
I don’t do that, but I daily drive a Steam Deck and can attest that it’s a fantastic device handheld. It’ll play a TON of stuff at low/medium settings natively, and you have a big PC to handle the top tear graphics-card-melters, which you can stream from (in that scenario the Deck is fine as it takes very little of the load).
My only caution point is the small screen. It’s 7 inches diagonal, so small print in games can be tough, especially if you have 40s eyes like me. Otherwise, it’s exceeded wildly beyond my expectations.
I’ve used it before when playing non-docked (otherwise I have a Blue yeti condenser mic hooked up into my docking hub).
The people I was playing with said I sounded good and clear. I’ve used it both with Discord and with Steam voice chat and I’ve never had an issue.
EDIT: I saw your post about issues with it when using wired headphones. That very well may be, but I can tell you it works fine with Bluetooth headphones (I alternate on a couple of pairs of BT bone conduction headphones).