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Comment by m_st | Hacker News Reader

My reason to buy a Wii U back then was that whenever I found the time to play a video game, I had to go through a session of Windows Update, Steam update and game update that I lost interest by the time it was ready.

Compare that to the Wii U back then: Turn on and play.

Nintendo even achieved to keep this mindset with the Switch: It will update in the background so usually you just turn it on and play.

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> Nintendo even achieved to keep this mindset with the Switch: It will update in the background so usually you just turn it on and play.

I don't agree. I play my switch maybe once every couple of weeks, and almost without fail there's a system or game update that it asks me to install.

Granted, _most_ updates can be put off for a while by hitting "update later", but I see very little difference between the consoles (and PCs) in terms of update behaviour these days, for better or worse.

Sleep mode. And consoles are way better at respecting your choice not to update both in regards to games and the OS. I can put the Switch to sleep and leave the game there for a week or a month and then come back exactly where I was.

With Wii U games rarely received patches, everything was on the disc and ran off it too.

That is happening for me only with games I didn't use recently.

However, we used play Fortnite quite often on both the Switch and the PS4. On the Switch it was ready immediately in most cases. If not, the update loaded and was installed rather quickly. Compare that to the PS4: It's updated in about 50% of the cases. If not, downloading takes very long and then it is applying the update so slow, that we usually just give up.

I got a steam deck - it makes a very decent attempt at transforming the former experience into the latter, but keeping access to all your existing PC games.

How well does it succeed? One reason I've only played games on consoles is that if I see a game that has PS5 on the box, I know it will run on my console. Do Steam games make a similar promise for the Steam Deck?

Re: Sleep - Compared a traditional console, the Steam Deck does not auto-download updates quietly in the background while its asleep/docked. That is my one gripe with it. You need to have the screen on and active for it to start downloading games.

On top of that, the default behavior is to stop downloads while playing a game. You can change this in the settings, but at a significant performance hit.

Re: The 'just works' - In handheld mode, all Steam Verified titles have 'just worked' for me. Docked mode is a different story, because no game has automatically switched resolution automatically. You need to set the Native resolution mode on a per-game basis.

Additionally, there is always a chance that an unverified game you're looking for will not work very well on the Steam Deck - be it control-wise, graphically, or some other reason. It is not as 'plug and play' as a traditional console, but the device continues to get better over time with updates.

Yes, if you're in the store page, you can look for an icon that confirms whether the game is verified for the Steam Deck.

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified

If a game works on Proton (http://protondb.com/), it will almost certainly run on the Steam Deck. And the Steam Deck UI does a pretty good job of highlighting games that run well on the Deck and telling you what the compatibility issues are, if anything.

Assuming the game itself runs fine, usually the main issue is mapping steam deck controls to the in-game keyboard and mouse config. I find the UX for doing this to be pretty confusing and terrible (doubly so when using an external controller), but this is helped some by the fact that you can apply controller mappings submitted by other Steam users.

Way back when I had a Playstation 3 it would update in the background but only if you paid for the subscription, otherwise, every time you turned it on, you had to wait for the updates to download to play a game, if the game had updates. This model for updates just rankled me so much I stopped buying Playstation, every time I turned it on, it had to download updates and I would forget why I had turned it on by the time I got back to it.

Huh. I had the complete opposite experience. My girlfriend and I used to joke that the U in Wii U stands for "update". Maybe it's just because we didn't play it frequently.

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