Steam Deck - Feedback after 3 years

Introduction

I have owned the Steam Deck since 2022, and have adored it since then for the most part.

Build Quality

The build quality is overall positive. The material and screen is super nice and holding it just feels right. It’s a plastic but not a cheap plastic material so it’s comfy to hold. However if putting pressure on it while holding, it creaks and the screen can go funny.

Performance

For a little tiny PC, the performance is pretty good. It can run pretty much any simple game on steam smoothly. Playing higher-end games can make it go hot and the fan is fairly loud. You would want to look out for the Steam Verified games when buying games for the steam deck to ensure great gameplay. Great games to enjoy that I recommend are: Terraria, Stardew Valley, The Forest, Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2 and so on.

Modding capabilities

Since the Steam Deck is based on SteamOS Linux, which is Arch Linux with the KDE Plasma Desktop enviroment, the modding capabiliaties are almost endless. You can add stuff like Cloud Gaming, Playstation Remote Play, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify and so on! A great plugin manager and store is Decky which is a plugin manager with loads upon loads of plugins that can theme your deck, add sounds, custom startup screens, and even integrate your phones notifications with your Deck!

Emulation

With the help of EmuDeck, the emulation scene on Deck is so good. With EmuDeck, the Steam Deck becomes an absolute emulation beast! It can run emulators like Xenia and RPCS3 With minimal lag!(depending on the game of course) EmuDeck Comes with steam rom manager to easily organize your emulator games and add artwork. EmuDeck also comes with a Switch emulator which can run switch games pretty good aswell. Importing roms to EmuDeck is also super easy as they have organization features built-in.

Storage

The Steam Deck comes with an SSD and a MicroSD slot. I recommend getting a big enough MicroSD card to store your emulator games and general steam games.

Conclusion - Worth it in 2025?

It depends. If you do not have a PC that is capable of running games and you need a portable device to rely on, then no. The steam deck is too underpowered to play modern games flawlessly. For that i’d recommend something like the ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion Go. If you do and you want to use it for simple games like Stardew Valley and/or emulation and modding, then it is perfect! However you might be better off getting something like a cheap switch second hand and modifying it.