Steam Deck was the best tech expenditure I've made in the last five years.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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Steam Deck
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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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Honestly coolest piece of tech since the iphone.
Wait I thought consoles are supposed to be getting more expensive for old hardware? Did Valve miss the memo?
Valve originally expected to lose money on every Steam Deck sold, but thanks to high volume of units sold and other factors this ended up not being the case. Even with tariffs affecting that bottom line, I think the Decks still ended up being more profitable than they ever expected and they can afford to do sales like this, even if they potentially result in hardware being sold at a loss.
Speaking of which, @Railcar8095@lemm.ee you told me 6 months ago to ping you if tariffs come into effect and the price of the deck doesn't increase.
FYI lemm.ee doesnt exist anymore but maybe @Railcar8095@lemmy.world is the same person?
My dude Railcar, we are all waiting for your reaction on the price of the steam deck over here.
It's me haha! But the tariffs war are on hold with the most outrageous frozen until November so...
And this is on a sale of the first version? I would be surprised about a permanent across the board discount, not this.
Sorry, but:
It's me, ~~Dio~~ Railcar!
Yep, yep, I'm never gonna get that baseline level of internet brain poisoning down to zero, am I. -sigh-
You fell for it, fool!
Ahhhhhh i need charge to my ham sandwich or something!
jfc jojo is a fucking fever dream
I assume they already have the hardware built and are bascially liquidating it. The 256 seemed a bit of a black sheep in the units, with most people choosing the 64 and upgrading storage themselves, or the 512 to maximize storage from factory + screen upgrade.
Mostly though just making a joke that valve is supposed to be following market trends and hiking the price regardless of actual conditions. The shareholders would be in shambles, if they had any.
Valve is paying the tariffs for now, like most businesses do, but as an overall tactic it's unsustainable for the long run. And half of them aren't actually in effect yet anyway because trump keeps pushing the dates back.
My guess would be that they are literally just doing a clearance sale on excess stock to free up some warehouse space somewhere.
Warehouse rent costs money, maybe they dont wanna pay it for nothing, or maybe that're working on some new shit they need that space for.
New one was in testing a while back so maybe they want to clear everything to build demand up
It's me! Do you have the comment by any chance or just remember by heart? As mentioned below, the tariffs are mostly in hold until November (or people start asking again about some files and a distraction is needed).
I vaguely remembered being told to ping someone over tariffs, so I did a search for tariffs within the community. The first post that came up was the one, and I found both your comment and mine pretty easily. Here's the sopuli link to it.
Valve originally expected to lose money on every Steam Deck sold, but thanks to high volume of units sold and other factors this ended up not being the case.
Link? I thought they never confirmed whether they were making a profit on hardware or not
I'm not sure they ever said it explicitly, but they said that selling the original 64GB LCD deck for $400 was a "painful" price point, and there were hardware pricing estimates that guessed each steam deck cost Valve around $500-550 at launch. It's been awhile since I looked at it, I'll see if I can get some of the relevant quotes together.
Would anyone recommend an LCD over an OLED model?
Over OLED? Probably not, but LCD is perfectly fine.
Unless you really care about OLED and slightly better battery, then a much cheaper LCD is a good choice.
Oh the OLED doesn’t have any performance boost?
As I understand it, it's the same engine under the hood, you're paying for better screen quality and a slightly longer battery life.
It has slightly different internal and external form factors in ... basically only esoteric ways that only come into play if you are doing certain kinds of physical mods or upgrades to it.
But yeah, the actual internal performance specs are the same, same chip, same shared RAM amount...
I think maybe the battery might have gotten a slight upgrade, either that or the power delivery / management may have gotten a slight upgrade / tweak, but I am not 100% sure about that.
A very minor one, but only in a roundablut way. Valve weren't targeting a performance boost, but a battery increase. They went for a newer generation of their processor with roughly the same processing power and slightly more efficiency. The thing is, because of the added efficiency it can sustain high loads without throttling for longer. Between that and the minute differences in processing power, it happens to have a tiny bit of a performance boost, but it's very very minor.
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I've owned the first gen Steam Deck since the day it came out. (LCD)
No problems, greatly enjoy it.
I wouldn't say I recommend it over the OLED, but they both work great. My OG LCD still holding up strong, but the OLED is definitely an improvement in both screen quality and battery.
I mean, I am an OLED Deck owner, and at this price point, if I didn't already have my OLED Deck?
This is a fucking steal at this price, compare it to non OLED laptops of similar specs/capabilities, then just tack on the price of like a portable membrane keyboard or something.
Yeah sorry, didn't intend to discourage anyone from the deal - it's great hardware at an incredible price. If you're indifferent on the screen or it's not applicable to your use, you know who you are and should jump on it. If you can't reasonably swing the dollars for OLED, you should also jump on it.
I still wouldn't recommend LCD over the OLED, it's undeniably the better configuration for handheld gaming.
Oh no need to apologize, I too very much prefer the OLED for my own most common use cases...
... but yeah, just wanted to point out that if you maybe want a pretty rock solid mobile gaming device ma bob that is also a laptop when you plug K+M into it, maybe also your existing desktop mon if you have one...
$320 bucks is a fucking steal, if you are maybe, price concscious, in these uh, economic collapse times, yeah, dont go for the premium model, black out your windows and play under the bedsheet like the good ole days rofl!
In a specific use case: absolutely. If you want to dock it a large percentage of the time and use it as a "PC games console," plugged into power and hooked up to your TV / projector / monitor / whatever:
- You're not going to care about the built in screen as much
- You're not going to care about the lesser battery as much
- The huge savings over an SD OLED will help you get over the 1 or 2 FPS you'll lose in most games.
If you're that person, you should definitely go for it. And even if you find yourself playing handheld more than you thought you would, it's still not a big deal.
Many people don't need an oled. Like casual players or people with it hooked to the tv most of the time.
For the price? Yeah absolutely. I got mine really discounted and it holds up, my partner has an oled which looks great and I like the larger screen, but not sure if $300 more is worth it for everyone. You can get a solid case & screen protector, battery bank and upgrade the ssd for nearly that.
The two main advantages of the OLED deck are a drastically better screen, and much better battery life in demanding titles.
Games that max out the Deck's power draw (Cyberpunk, Bladur's Gate, etc) will typically get about 1:30 of battery life on the LCD deck, and 2:30 on the OLED deck, which is a pretty huge increase. It's less of an issue for less demanding games, and you can always get a high output battery pack instead.
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I had both and I find the OLED massively overhyped.
I have an LCD Steam Deck which I got used for around 300$ since I already have a Ps5 and the Deck was my first time trying pc gaming.
Because of how everyone was praising the OLED, I thought the screen would be bad, but it is awesome to my eyes.
The battery management is the annoying part of an handheld, but you also have it, maybe less, with the OLED.
If the prices were the same, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t get an OLED model, but it ain’t the case and I wasn’t be ready to pay more than 300$, so an used LCD was perfect.
I assume this means they’re trying to clear out the LCD stock and be OLED-only soon?
If I didn't have a Steamdeck already, I would buy at this price 100%
Lol, better deal than a Switch 2 if you like playing more than just Nintendo games!
(Also you can play almost every single Nintendo game in existence on it)
In fact, you can play more Nintendo games on the Steam Deck than you can on the Switch 2. Just not the newest ones (yet).
I've managed to get BotW working at basically just a bit worse than the performance level of a Switch 1.
Pretty much everything else is gucci, given that you run some games for a bit to allow a shader cache to build up.
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Pirating Nintendo games is the morally right thing to do.
Correct, no notes.
Iwata died, Reggie left, they're evil now, NOA being led by Bowser should be a tip off to this lol.
Been checking the refurb page for weeks now. I'm about to pull the trigger on this.
Any recommendations for a budget dock that I can buy from somewhere other than amazon? I've been boycotting amazon since pre-covid and I dont intend to break that here. I'd love to find something cheaper than the official valve one though.
Accessories like this are always the hardest thing to find direct from the manufacturer/on other platforms.
Any recommendations for a budget dock
I don't know if it's the type you're looking for but I'm quite happy with my Genki Covert Dock. It does the job quite well, and the portability is nice to have.
This isnt quite what I had in mind, but I didnt even know form factors like this were an option! I think this exactly meets my criteria
I have a cheap Ivoler brand dock and it's worked really well. Not sure where to buy it besides Amazon though.
I would specifically recommend against buying from Jsaux's website though, their website isn't actually safe to buy from.
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Haha! Highly recommended! This is the version I bought when it first came out, and it's still going strong. Battery life is pretty bunk, though.
I have 512GB LCD and 1TB OLED, I was too lazy to put up a listing for the LCD yet but does 350€ seem reasonable? It's from the pre-order batch so it's one of those early units (with the better fan)
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