I’ve been considering purchasing a steam deck. My pc is in my office, which limits interaction with the rest of the family if I want to play anything. I’ve tried playing mobile games, but just can’t get use to the controls. Think it’s worth getting one?
I’m going to offer an alternative.
Steam lets you streamplay games from your computer to another computer.
Your phone is a computer.
You don’t like the built in controls for a phone.
You can pair xbox and ps5 controllers to androids phones with little to no effort. Not sure about other phone OS’s, and quite frankly, not my bag baby.
So now you have a controller hooked up to your phone, and it’s channeling games from your computer over wifi.
Never had a cause to try it personally, but I might just do that and come back to confirm it works.
Might save you a couple bucks for your kids college fund.
Edit: I hooked it up and it worked on my android phone. I had to download Valve’s “Steam Link” app, the regular Steam app didn’t want to do it. Hooking up a PS5 controller was pretty straightforward, just holding the ps button and the screenshot button until it flashes and scanning for a bluetooth device. I used wired headphones for the sound, not sure if wireless headphones would have issues with a phone pairing to multiple bluetooth devices at the same time, I know that’s sometimes a problem for phones.
I appreciate it. I have an iPhone, but I’ll have to give this a try!
I agree that streaming might be worth considering, but instead of Steam Play, which is quite meh, try Moonlight. That’s the client, and the open source server is called Sunshine. The performance and latency is much better. If you want to take it to the next level, you can add Tailscale to the mix for seamless streaming outside your local network/WiFi. As long as the underlying connection is fast enough, it tends to work really well.
About the controller I can say I bought a ps4 controller a couple weeks ago. It works out of the box with my iPhone and with steam running on Linux. I had read it was compatible but it was so painless that it took me by surprise.
And proton is also fantastic. Most windows games work as well as natively, so you should be able to play most of them on the deck
I’ve tried that and for me the steam deck is better.
Well obviously a purpose-built piece of hardware is going to be a better experience than streaming a game to your phone. Streaming to your phone has the distinct advantage of being free.
Definitely something to try before buying a deck, however in my experience the in-home streaming is a pretty poor gaming experience and kills any enjoyment I would have had otherwise. The internet in my house is pretty good. My house isn’t huge and I’ve a got a good quality router, with an additional WAP (not wet-ass pussy, the other WAP) on the floor above the router. most of my stuff is on Ethernet so there’s not a lot of traffic. Even with all that, the connection was incredibly laggy and artifacty at best and, at worst, disconnected constantly. This was a couple years ago so maybe they’ve streamlined it, but hopefully your experience is much better than mine.