Hello. I’m a college freshmen and I’m wondering if a 1TB Steam Deck OLED is worth it for me. I already have a Nintendo Switch but I don’t have a good laptop for gaming. I’ve heard great things about the Steam Deck in general, but I’ve heard things about game compatibility, tinkering, the portability and other things that make me a little hesitant. Some games I want to play have some issues (Vampire the Masquerade: Booodlines isn’t compatible and probably won’t play well with a controller, the Persona games need internet connection a ton of the time thanks to DRM, and it’s hard to add GOG games), but I also noticed that the Steam Deck is great for emulation. I’m very mixed on if I should save up for a 1TB Steam Deck OLED after Christmas or if I should either get an alternative or stick with that I have. Any help would be appreciated!
No one knows the answer except you. If it doesnt break the bank for you, sure go for it. There are also tons of LCD decks on the used market for great prices
The steam deck is basically a laptop with controllers instead of a keyboard. The thing with game compatability is due to the fact that the steamdeck runs linux. Linux has excellent support for retro game emulation, so no worries there. Just install emudeck and your good to go. In order to run windows games, valve uses the proton layer, which is basically wine fine tuned for running games. The steam deck uses this automatically for windows steam games and its just a checkbox setting to enable it for non-steam exe games. That being said, while it works for a majority of games and windows apps in general, some still have bugs. You can look on the protonDB and it will tell you what fames work and how well. Games with easy anticheat have been known to have issues as well.