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Transcript
00:00Hey, what's up, MKBHD here.
00:26Alright, right off the top, shout out to the new water bottles that are finally in the MKBHD.com
00:32store. Solid metal, double insulated, 18 ounces, and we did make a light mode and a dark mode.
00:40And normally I am a dark mode type of person, but I think this might be the first time I'm
00:46actually a little more drawn to and have been using light mode. Just saying. I'll leave that
00:52up to you guys to choose. I'll keep an eye on which one sells more, but choose wisely.
00:56Either way, stay hydrated. But either way, this, this right here is the Valve Steam Deck. Teased
01:02it a little while ago. It turns out there's a lot of hype around this. And now that I've been using
01:07it for a bit, I can clearly see that there's not a lot of people that I would actually recommend
01:11this to, but for those people, they're going to have a lot of fun with it. So the Steam Deck is a
01:17$399 handheld gaming console with a screen surrounded by non-removable controls with
01:24basically a mini PC inside. If you haven't heard about it, it can kind of be difficult to
01:28understand what a Steam Deck is. I guess the natural reaction is, Oh, it's a, like a Nintendo
01:32switch on steroids, but it really is a lot more than that. Now, Valve isn't exactly known for
01:38making a ton of great hardware. Like we know Steam of course, and they make some games,
01:43but they have made some less successful hardware projects. Like they made the Steam controller,
01:48which was eventually discontinued and the Steam link, which was also discontinued. And let's not
01:55even get started on Steam machines. And it's not even clear at this point, how long the Steam Deck
02:00will last, but I'm rooting for it. So the challenge for the Steam Deck is this is meant
02:05to be able to play any of the games in your Steam library, wherever you want, which is an amazing
02:10goal. But the problem is a lot of these games all are designed with different controller mechanics
02:17in mind. Some of them are for mouse and keyboard. Some of them are for a controller. Some of them
02:22are just a keyboard. Some of them are hybrids, whatever you want. And so the Steam Deck is trying
02:27to let you play as many of those games as possible by adapting to them. Now, I don't know what kind
02:34of gamer you are, but for me personally, I get like really heavy into one, maybe two games at
02:40a time. And then I play them a ton until I'm sick of them. And then I move on. You know, some other
02:45people have a bunch of games in rotation. For either person though, basically, I don't think
02:50you're going to be able to be quite as good at the game as you were on PC, but that's often outweighed
02:57by how fun it is to be able to play this game in all these new places that you could never play
03:02before. So let me just say ergonomically, I think the Steam Deck is pretty great. It's much, much
03:07bigger than a Switch, but it's still impressively light. It's 688 grams. Basically, it's like one
03:12and a half times the Switch. It's made of all plastic here, but there is not much flexion at
03:17all. No creaking. The thing feels very well built. And then there's just tons of controls. So first
03:24of all, it's a glass touchscreen up front, seven inch diagonal, 1280 by 800, 60 Hertz IPS display.
03:31Then there's ABXY buttons. There's a D-pad. There's two thumb sticks with this nice texture.
03:38There's also two touch pads with haptic feedback. There's a menu button top right and a view button
03:45top left. The steam button that brings up the steam menu on the bottom left and the quick
03:50settings button on the bottom right that gives you things like battery life and frame rate limits and
03:54brightness, et cetera. Then there's four shoulder buttons on the top R1, R2 and L1, L2. And there's
04:02four more assignable grip buttons around the back. So R4, R5 and L4, L5. And they're all pretty
04:09well laid out. I mean, those back buttons sit comfortably where your fingers usually sit.
04:13The grip is nicely curved. It feels natural to hold. The speakers of course are up front facing
04:17you. And then up top is the volume buttons, a headphone jack for some headphones and a USB-C
04:24port for charging. But then at the bottom is a micro SD card slot, which is surprisingly important.
04:30See the 399 is the baseline version and that will get you 64 gigs, the lowest amount of storage.
04:37And that also is the slowest storage. If you go ahead and just check your steam library real quick,
04:42there's a pretty good chance you'll find at least one game that's more than 64 gigs. So this 256 gig
04:49version I have here is 529. And then there is a half terabyte 649 version coming later, which
04:55apparently also has a nano edge display. But yeah, I only have two games that I'm playing on
05:00my steam library right now. One is called dirt rally. It's about 40 gigs. And the other is NBA
05:062K 22 and it's 117 gigs. And so I don't really have much room for any other games, but the nice
05:13thing is, like I said, there's that micro SD card slot, which just pops in and out like normal like
05:18that. And you can just add a terabyte of extra storage and impressively. And thankfully that
05:23actually will give you totally normal performance playing games off of that card. So I would
05:28recommend saving a little bit and getting one of these two. But yeah, once I got the steam deck,
05:32really all I wanted to do was just play some games. So I got my two good games going and
05:37immediately was playing them in places. I had never played those games before. Typically I
05:41have to sit in the one room where the gaming PC and monitor and keyboard and everything is set up,
05:47but I was playing dirt rally sitting on a couch or just in random other rooms. This could easily
05:52extend out anywhere at the back of a car or on a flight, the waiting room at a doctor's office,
05:57I don't know, basically anywhere where you can catch a spare hour or two, you can play a game.
06:02Now there is a tiny bit of latency that you can sort of mentally calibrate for. Again,
06:07this goes back to me saying you're not going to be as good in the game as you would be on a PC,
06:13but I was able to get used to it enough to make it enjoyable. And I think that's where focusing
06:17on the numbers on paper will get you kind of lost. You know, it runs a custom AMD APU,
06:22it has 16 gigs of RAM. You might be tempted as a gamer to say, Oh, well, what if, what if it had
06:2790 Hertz or 120 Hertz display or focusing on faster storage to reduce latency a little would
06:32have been nice, but the battery life, the battery life it's rated for two to eight hours. And I'll
06:42just say, you'll definitely get closer to two a lot more often than you'll get close to eight.
06:47So 60 Hertz is fine. 1280 by 800 on a seven inch display is fine. And the controllers and
06:54ergonomics are really good. They're comfy. The other game that I mentioned, I play a lot NBA 2K
06:59works great. Again, you got to take a few games to calibrate for the slight delay between moving the
07:06controls and then the actual player moving. Even if you're not playing online, like it's most
07:10noticeable when shooting free throws or really any type of shooting where that's timing related.
07:14But once you get the hang of that, it's fun. I mean, I've never, I've literally never played NBA
07:182K anywhere other than on my couch with the PlayStation in front of me or on a gaming
07:23computer in the studio. So I'm out here sitting on a random couch with no TV in the room playing 2K
07:29on a flight playing 2K anywhere away from the normal setup is so new. It just felt like unlocking
07:35a level of fun that I couldn't access before, but here's the X factor. These games that I've
07:40been playing work really well on the steam deck because those controls are already mapped. Great.
07:46Because those are games that are typically played with controllers. I mean, you could get a wheel
07:49for dirt, but those are games that are already mapped. Great. So you'll notice if you try to go
07:54into the menus in 2K or something with a different part of the deck, like the touch screen or the
07:59touch pads. Yeah. Those things don't really work very well. They've tried to map it, but it's
08:03pretty bad. It's inconsistent. It's imprecise. You'd never use them, but at least the controls
08:08that are supposed to work do. That's why it's in the great on deck section in the steam store.
08:14They had to make a specific section for games whose controls map over perfectly, but there's a
08:19lot of games whose controls don't map over well or have unknown compatibility where it's really a
08:25toss up. And there are games in the steam store that are just straight up unsupported on steam
08:28deck and they won't work. So anytime you search the store, you can leave verified games only,
08:34which works really well, or you can risk it a little and include games that are playable,
08:39but not perfect. And that'll just be up to you. As of right now, apex legends, pub G destiny to
08:46fall guys, and a bunch of others are completely incompatible with the steam deck. So in that
08:51sense, it's pretty rough, but this isn't really meant to be looked at like a switch on steroids.
08:56This really is much more of a full on computer shrunken down to be more portable. So the hard
09:04carry case that it comes with, I really like it. I think it's very good. The fans and the
09:08exhaust vent at the top are pretty much constantly working. It takes like five minutes of gaming
09:13before it's spitting out hot air. And the 45 watt charger that it comes with, you pretty much have
09:18to take it everywhere if you want to game for more than about three hours. But the reward
09:23for dealing with all of these trade offs is being able to play these games in all sorts of places
09:29that you've probably never been able to play these games before. And that's the fun of it.
09:34So even though they're ergonomically similar, and it's like tempting to compare this to a Nintendo
09:38switch, they're not even in the same category at all. And they're for completely different audiences
09:43to the steam deck already has a pretty hardcore community that's mapping the controls to various
09:48new games. This thing has gotten a ton of software updates from valve since I first got it bug fixes,
09:56extra features, experimental stuff, there's people out here plugging it into a monitor and a keyboard
10:01and a mouse, and it'll happily run Linux like a straight up portable PC. And apparently, if you
10:06take it apart, there's enough room inside for a whole air tag. So instead of waiting for a lost
10:12and found feature to be added, you can just do that. But probably my favorite, as you can see,
10:18is my white steam deck. There's of course, no actual white steam deck, but I've got a skin
10:23on it from our channel sponsor d brand. And they also sent over their steam deck glass,
10:27which is available now. It is a precisely perfect fit screen protector that keeps the screen
10:33sensitivity on point. And they've got a whole line of steam deck accessories under the project name
10:38kill switch, which is hilarious. So the steam deck is fun. Even if I'm not the biggest gamer in the
10:42world, just being able to take these couple new games to new places and play them in places I
10:48would never ordinarily be able to, that's the fun of it. If you want that experience, then
10:53you should try to get a steam deck. But there's not a lot of people in that group. But if you are,
10:59yeah, check it out. Even if half the games don't work yet.
11:03Thanks for watching. Catch you guys the next one. Peace.