Valve’s Steam Deck is now 4 years old. Insane. In the past four years, the handheld has improved a lot: SteamOS has matured, the handheld’s amazing community has released easily installable emulator suites and software plugins, and the system’s Proton compatibility layer has become almost flawless.
In the past four years, as Steam Deck has made its mark, Xbox has plummeted. I’m a journalist that started my career working on Xbox fan sites like the long-dead ICXM/XboxMAD. Xbox has been core to my identity since the days of Halo: Combat Evolved and Red vs Blue. (Keep your eyes open for an interview on the latter later this week, hopefully!) But Xbox has fumbled hard, and it’s not just in the way that gamers see it, but the way the industry at large works behind-the-scenes: Xbox codes are rarely offered outside of exclusive releases and very few reviews are performed on that system.
With that in mind, Xbox, for me, has largely become a backwards compatibility machine, but also this is something that Steam Deck excels at provided I find some way to obtain games that either aren’t native to PC or have been delisted over the years. There are a lot of games that I’ve wanted to revisit that have native PC versions that have weird quirks on Windows, but simply work great on Steam Deck.
For example, recently, I wanted to replay Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, a game that I loved when it released 17 years ago. On Xbox, it’s not backward compatible, and the game’s remaster was also delisted. On Steam Deck, not only is the game available to grab somewhere, but it also runs like a dream and has full controller support.
After that, I wanted to play Fallout 3, a game I own on Xbox and PC (the latter multiple times). Yes, playing the game at 4K 60fps is great on Xbox, but on Steam Deck I can also max out the game’s texture and shadow quality and make the raw assets of the game look better. Also, playing via Proton actually eliminates some of the weirdness of the game on Windows such as the old HDR flicker that’s still present in the game. Also, mods.
I’m also a huge fan of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, a game I often write about here on FRVR, and I do love going back to play that original Xbox version. With that said, the fact that Steam Deck lets me take OpenMW, the full fan engine rewrite of Bethesda’s RPG, on the go with hours of battery life and full mod support? Let’s face it, I’ll only be turning on that Xbox version for a hit of nostalgia.
As Valve’s Steam Deck has evolved, the platform has only gotten better. With Heroic Games Launcher, I can install classic games from GOG, exclusives and freebies from the Epic Games Store, and more. I can even use the Steam Deck to power one of my more recent hobbies, virtual pinball, with the Deck not only capable of running fan-made VPX recreations of classic tables, but also Pinball FX, Pinball M, and more. While this is also possible on Windows with higher fidelity, every Windows 11 update annoyingly breaks my VPinball setup.
There’s also the fact that the Steam Deck is literally the only platform outside of a desktop PC where RTS games actually play well. A few months ago, I played through Sins of a Solar Empire’s Halo total conversion Sins of the Prophets for the first time, entirely on Deck. Yes, it was far from the optimal way to play the game, but with fan-made controller bindings (and some tweaks because some of them are made with some bizarre choices) it became very playable.
The fact of the matter is that Steam Deck is pretty much the perfect platform for everything I use it for, even if I don’t use it exclusively. If I want to play Battlefield 6, I can’t, I have to use another platform as anti-cheat is the one beast that Steam Deck sadly can’t best. Additionally, Original Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS3 emulation isn’t far from perfect on the handheld, and that means whipping out the old beasts for the few remaining exclusives I want to play.
There are still persistent issues with the Steam Deck that still exist four years after its release, such as the keyboard not appearing in desktop mode when you need it most, and that using the Steam store is still ironically pretty damn awful. (Thank you, Steam mobile app.) Nevertheless, the experience has largely only improved since launch.
After four years, Steam Deck is now being used as a hardware target for a number of AAA games, likely because AI datacenters have siphon up every resource on Earth… including the RAM needed to produce more Steam Decks. While the upcoming Steam Machine, if it ever does release, may supplant the handheld for some, the Steam Deck will likely stay at the heart of my gaming output until it can no longer function. As for the Xbox, well, it can gather dust until Halo: Campaign Evolved launches later this year.
