Hacker News Reader

Comment by elpocko | Hacker News Reader

I purchased one recently. After one day of frustration trying to get at least one of my favorite games to work, I sent it back for a refund.

It's a great piece of hardware that still needs a lot of work in the software department. It's not ready. Not even the on-screen keyboard works properly; the final straw for me was when I was locked into the fullscreen main menus of several games with no way out (no mouse, no keyboard, no game controller, nothing), other than holding down the power button.

Look around the internet, you'll find many reviews that say the same things about the device. Don't buy this thing yet if you have a low frustration threshold. Don't listen to the fanbois.

View on HN

As a reference point to others: I have a massive Steam library (>300 games) and every game marked as "Verified for Steam Deck" (~20%) worked out of the box. I also played many games marked as "Playable" (e.g. Fallout New Vegas) which also worked perfectly without any specific configuration.

I also had no issues with stability and the Steam Button was a reliable way to get me out of the game whenever I misconfigured something or started a game with "unknown" ranking, which actually didn't work.

That was my experience as well. I was sticking to "verified" games (Crypt of the Necrodancer) and controls worked in the game's menu but not the game... using the developers official steam deck controller configuration. I updated the deck, redownloaded the game, same thing. I was holding a nearly $700 piece of hardware failing its first task and it was more tedious than gaming on my linux desktop because I had to troubleshoot with a controller instead of mouse and keyboard.

I am sure it could have worked with more tinkering, but I wanted to play games, not tinker. Truth is, the fanboys like to tinker, they like to balance trade offs and do performance tweaks. I wasn't looking for that at all.

Every time I've mentioned this I hear from fanboys how theirs just works, but the steam forums filled with people dropping into the terminal and editing files leaves me skeptical.

Ended up getting a return and buying a Logitech G Cloud that I love dearly and play every day.

I would have loved to tinker with my Steam Deck; it just wouldn't let me.

Most of the time I was staring at some game menu, trying to figure out how to get out of there because none of the buttons/combos did anything. Skyrim wouldn't let me create a character - Steam+X(?) for the onscreen keyboard did not work. It also wouldn't let me quit while it waited for me to type a character name and required a power cycle.

Sounds like you had some hardware issue.

My first steamdeck had a bad battery (it wouldn't last more than like 15 minutes, really flaky).

I spent some time troubleshooting (as per valve supports direction) and everything kind of always worked (when plugged in anyway). The buttons, going to "desktop mode", going back to the steam app. They had me install steamos again from a usb stick oddly. It didn't help.

After trying a few things they sent me a new one, and its been great. There was some wierdness in selecting the controller, but that seems to have been resolved.

It should have an hdmi port and a usbA port... instead of the solitary usb. This would have made the os reinstall so much easier.

Valve wisely filters out unsupported games by default, at least today, because compatibility can definitely be a challenge.

When you get stuck in a crashed game, you can use shortcuts to quit it (hold Steam + B). This likely won't work in desktop mode, but you can configure KDE to do whatever you want if you run into trouble.

There are definitely UI issues to be fixed but if you stick to the normal, supported games and menus, the Deck itself is entirely on par with other consoles in my opinion.

The miserable state in which game publishers release their games on PC is a whole different can of worms that proves that companies expect quite a bit of tolerance of PC gamers.

> Don't buy this thing yet if you have a low frustration threshold. Don't listen to the fanbois.

I'm sorry to hear your first experience with the steamdeck was so poor (I don't work for valve, I'm just Canadian)

While I believe you, I'm confused how you ended up in that state - valve has a list of games that work perfectly (according to them, I obviously haven't verified them) and then games that may work with some tinkering.

I can only imagine you tried games that were marked as not working (requiring tinkering) and if you have a low frustration tolerance (totally fair) it doesn't make sense why you'd try those games then conclude the device isn't ready?

I have a steamdeck, not a fanboy (in fact I want to sell it because I don't like how big it is) I also have a low frustration tolerance for gaming (I just want to play for a few minutes after work) and yet, I haven't managed to become frustrated with it yet. Where does our experiences differ?

I've only had this experience with one game that was marked as not supported at all (Batman: Arkham Asylum). After first setting a different version of Proton for the game as per internet instructions I could not get past the startup menu at all. I tried all the buttons and got quite frustrated that I had to quit the game with the available shortcuts every time.

Then I found out I could just click next on the touch screen :')

I haven't had any issues with games since. Lost of games, even some marked as not playable, ended up working fine.

It is more than ready, but it assumes some baseline skills to get the most out of it. It has awesome controls and its on-screen keyboard is alright, it is a game console after all.

In fact, Valve did an awesome job making it extremely usable and pushing so much performance out of such a platform.

You have had the exact opposite experience of me. Everything I have wanted to work has worked.

What games were you trying? Valve is very open about what works out of the box, and it does work for those things. If you wish to push it beyond that, you can usually get it quite far, but sometimes it requires tinkering.

Yeah it seems kind of janky overall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com