In an era where a new handheld comes out seemingly once a month, I think I’ve been reaffirmed in my choice to only use the Steam Deck many times! The Steam Deck is seriously so good! As you all likely know, I got my Steam Deck in 2023, and I’ve been using it heavily since. The Steam Deck has many things that I think make it the best handheld on the market, and I’d like to talk about them a bit!

Firstly, and most importantly, the software updates! So many competitors in the console space kind of just release something, and that’s it. There are security updates and things like that, but not feature stuff, not improvements, or anything of that nature. On the Steam Deck, since I got it in 2023, there have been so many huge improvements. As time has gone on, Proton has been swiftly improved, we’ve seen even more decky community plugins, we’ve gotten system-level features directly from Valve, and even BIOS updates that allow overclocking and undervolting as well as supporting community-made hardware mods at the BIOS level. I think Valve is alone in their support for the Deck; no one else in the industry goes as far as they do, and it’s greatly appreciated. I think this is reason enough to pick a Steam Deck over the other handhelds on the market. The wealth of software updates and community support mean the Deck is also extremely versatile.

Second, it’s really versatile! We are starting to see some other PC handhelds ship with limited-size track pads, but the Steam Deck has had huge ones from the start! And two of them! These trackpads seem like they are probably not too big of a deal, but it’s actually a make-or-break when it comes to playing games designed for keyboard and mouse. So many games that are playable on Deck that would just be impossible on a ROG or a Switch or some other competitor. This coincides well with the community-made control layouts with Steam Input. Because the Deck is so popular, it’s likely that someone has already put in the legwork for binding the controls for whatever game you’re playing to the Steam Deck. You can seriously, actually, play games designed without controller support on it! It’s not an issue because of the wealth of software features and the abundance of input options on the Deck.

The software library is also just massive. Of course, you could say this for any of the PC handhelds, but because of the Steam Deck’s popularity, often it’s a target for devs to publish to; many game devs have implemented pre-configured Steam Deck settings in their games to make the experience even easier for Deck players. Since the Deck is also just a PC, you can install any store you want and put your games from there on it too. The community has helped here too with various launchers to ease this process like Lutris, Heroic, or EmuDeck; which make installing even the games you own outside of Steam a breeze. Because it’s a PC, all your games are here! No need to rebuy games just for Steam Deck, you can play your existing game library with no upgrade fees or rebuying.

All that said, we are starting to see the second generation wave of PC handhelds hit right now, most notably the Xbox ROG Ally, that address some of the Steam Deck’s shortcomings. Probably the biggest one is that the battery life on Deck is quite poor; this is beginning to be addressed by competitors such as ROG. Also, these new handhelds are shipping with much more powerful SOCs. I think the Deck’s horsepower is really all you needed, but now we are starting to see games ship with Unreal Engine 5, which takes huge, powerful desktop PCs to even run at 1080 on lowered settings. I think the beefier horsepower of the Xbox ROG Ally could help to ease some of the woes of UE5 games, but it’s going to be quite the battle on pricing. The Deck is so established in the market now, and there’s a healthy used market and modding scene; it’s very possible to get one for under 300! Though the Deck may seem weak, I think the fact that the Switch 2 benchmarks so similarly means we’ll be seeing devs targeting machines of that caliber for a very long time. Still, I’m so excited to see what else happens in the PC handheld space. In my opinion, this is the most exciting thing happening in the games industry right now!