I’m sick of all this “AAA games are all bad now” discourse. I agree with it, but I’m sick of talking about it. It’s been going on for years and people still act like it’s a new and surprising development.

Brand loyalty, franchise continuity, and newness are almost never factors for me. I just find out organically about the games that sound fun to me, and then I play those. Old or new, AAA or indie, it doesn’t matter. If it seems appealing and the reviews are decent, I’ll try it.

Gaming is way more fun when you’re not perpetually upset about the latest BS that EA or Activision is trying to pull. If you keep getting burned, then take your hand off the flame.

I bought a Steam Deck because I like playing games, and the Deck makes that more accessible. Simple as that.

Selling my LCD Deck and buying an OLED wouldn’t actually change anything for me. I would still use it in the same places, at the same times, to play the same games. Even the battery isn’t a big concern for me because, between wall outlets and an external battery pack, I never actually drain mine.

You got an OLED and are blown away by the improvements? That’s great, good for you. But it feels a little insulting to be told the LCD model is old hat when it totally isn’t.

Plus I’ve already sunk some money into to my Deck and would rather keep my upgrades intact.

Somehow I never heard about the bug before 3.5 released to Stable, and I used it on Preview for months. Valve may not have realized the scope of the problem until it reached Stable.

We got a few comments on the GitHub page about this from Nephyrin, a Valve developer, but not a definite “we’re working on this.”

There’s active discussion on the Steam forums, too, but still no Valve response and there’s a lot of argumentative back-and-forth among users. The problem is that it doesn’t occur on all units.

My guess? Valve is working on this, but they haven’t found any reliable way to re-create the bug, which is the first step in debugging. They’re staying silent because saying “We have been unable to reliably reproduce the issue” will confuse users into thinking they’re denying the problem, but saying “We’re working on it” will mislead users into believing that a fix is right around the corner.

The workaround for the time being is to manually set the GPU clock. I know, it sucks. I wish I could offer better advice, but I haven’t run across any and I can’t troubleshoot it myself because I haven’t encountered the issue.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/y6lt6s/important_warning_for_users_of_the_polymc_mod/

PolyMC has been an exceptionally bad choice of launcher for a while now.

I personally use PrismLauncher and haven’t had any problems. PolyMC was a fork of MultiMC, and PrismLauncher is also a fork of MultiMC. https://prismlauncher.org/

The fundamental problem is that there is nothing special about a “Steam Machine.” The Steam Deck is special because it’s an all-in-one handheld gaming device, but a console version of it would literally just be a normal PC with SteamOS preloaded onto it.

If you really want a Steam Deck-like console for your living room, then you can just get a PC and throw something like ChimeraOS or HoloISO onto it. Bam, DIY Steam Machine.

If you want something with better value, you can get one of those mini-PCs with RDNA graphics in them and do the same thing. Now you have a lightweight, moderately performant Steam Machine for a few hundred dollars. Or, heck, just get a Steam Deck and a dock.

This was a big part of why the original Steam Machines failed. Sure, SteamOS has better game support than it did then, but it would still just be a PC with Valve branding slapped on top.

Valve has been an advocate of Linux for a while now. They didn’t like the direction Windows was going in due to Microsoft’s personal interests in the gaming industry, and they’re using Linux as a way to distance themselves from it. They’ve probably done more for Linux gaming than any other single entity, once you count the impact on PR and adoption rates.

None of the other companies in handheld PCs share this interest in Linux. Valve’s bread and butter is software and game sales, but everyone else is primarily focused on hardware. They don’t have any reason to get you to use Linux and they have no incentive to develop and maintain their own version of it, so they just slap Windows on the device. Easier for them – less software to maintain – and “easier” for most users – no faffing about with Linux and Proton.

This obviously comes at the cost of the nice user interface that the Steam Deck ships with, but that’s not a worthwhile tradeoff in the eyes of the manufacturers.

As for why you would get one? Size and performance.

I’ve always preferred to own games on Steam because it feels more permanent than anywhere else. I’m never gonna lose access to my account, I’m never gonna have to worry about new hardware that’s not backwards-compatible, and I’m never gonna have to deal with weird launcher migrations (Origin -> EA).

For a while there the Switch become my platform of choice because of its hybrid nature, but Valve has managed to rope me right back in with the Deck. I’ve even re-bought some games just to have them on Steam.

You mean you weren’t constantly checking the various availability calculators and agonizing over every single day that your unit didn’t ship??

Ah, IGN. I’d say they have bad takes, but that would imply some amount of consistency.

Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even go for a generational upgrade. I don’t really play many games that push the Deck to its limit, and I almost never get AAA titles anywhere near release, if at all.

If and when my Steam Deck starts to feel like it’s in need of an upgrade, then I’ll upgrade. My last handheld PC lasted from 2017-2022. I even still have it, though the Deck has obviously displaced it.

I don’t like screen protectors even for things where I should definitely have them. Not even my phone has one.

With the Deck in particular, I just can’t see it ever coming in handy. It is literally always either in my hands, sitting in a secure location charging, or in its case. Even on the off chance that I drop it, the odds are low that it will fall in such a way that it damages the screen.

If it ever does break, I’ll just replace the screen. It’ll take more effort and be more expensive, but I prefer that risk over dealing with screen protectors.

JRPGs. I don’t usually like turn based combat, and I also don’t like when games spend LOADS of time on story sequences. A friend of mine recently convinced me to try Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and it drove me up the wall that the first 10-15 minutes of the game only contained like 2 minutes of gameplay.

I’ll make exceptions on occasion, but the story and combat both have to be absolutely phenomenal for me to give it a fair shake.

You do realize that 30fps can also fit cleanly into 60hz, right…?