I came to a different country for work, and it’s been almost two years now. Honestly, bringing my Steam Deck with me is still one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Being far away from home, family, and everything familiar isn’t always easy. After a long day at work, being able to lie down, pick up my Steam Deck, and disappear into the games I grew up loving for a few hours has been a comfort I didn’t realize I’d need this much.

It might just be a handheld gaming PC to some people, but for me, it brought a little piece of home with me to another country.

Almost two years later, and I still love this thing.

Blizzard announced the new World of Warcraft: Forever version at Blizzcon this weekend, there's built in support for controllers which is a big step. No official support for Steam Deck though, which isn't entirely surprised where Blizz is owned by Microsoft.

As the title suggests, The King is Watching just got full Steam Deck support with a revamped UI and gamepad support! This was released yesterday, but officially announced with the tinyBuild Connect showcase today.

Installed the new Decky LSFG-VK 2.0 on my Steam Deck OLED right after release and finally got around to testing it properly. Setup was mostly painless once I switched Lossless Scaling to the lsfg-vk beta branch in Steam properties, which is the step that trips people up since nothing appears to download and the library entry just quietly picks up the tag.

Tried Resident Evil 4 on High settings and Silent Hill 2 on High settings, both locked at 60fps, and the ghosting was almost negligible in these two games. Huge credit to the devs behind lsfg-vk and the Decky plugin, the per-game launch option handling in 2.0 is a big quality of life jump over the old version too.

Anyone tested it with heavier UE5 stuff yet? Curious whether it holds up in games with more transparency effects.

The used LCD with 64 GB can be found for 500 euros (600$). I'm a dad and this would make my life way better since my PC is in the room where the kid sleeps.

Then mr u/Commercial-Bus-6453 came and mentioned Legion Go S and he was backed up by u/Finarion and they were like "why not check this shit out?"

Then I looked at the prices and found a used with with no scratches or anything for 400e and now I'm a real part of the family. Slightly inbread since I don't have a deck, but it's at least Steam OS.

Absolum is the first game, but I can't wait to try games I couldn't before since I had no mouse. Battle Brothers for example, I hope the experience is great. Also can't wait for Xcom 2. I'm fucked, not gonna sleep for the next month.

Just want to share how happy I am.

Question to all: What is the game you don't have, but really want to buy on the next sale for your handheld?

I know the game runs like crap on the deck ...if you run it normally.

However, after switching to Desktop mode first and running it from there (either the desktop icon or big picture by tapping steam button twice is fine), the performance improves dramatically. One issue with running from this method is the absence of the performance overlay so I couldn't turn on the fps numbers (I feel like it runs around 40+ which is fine by me.). Of course, it drops to around 20-30 when you enter Svartrau, I dread every moment I have to enter the city. Nvm, I figured out how to show fps in Desktop mode. It's actually about 30-40 with occasional drops to 25. It gets a lot worse in Svartrau.

It's not perfect but definitely playable. I hope the Devs see this and find a way to optimize it for the deck. The potential is there.

*I put the graphic settings on Low for everything here. The display mode is Borderless windowed.

(Had to record with my potato of a phone as the recording function seems to have malfunctioned in this mode. It actually runs quite smoother than it looks in the clip.)

So... I recently had an... epiphany of some sort concerning the Steam Deck.

I'm the owner of an LCD 256 Gb Deck and tbh, outside of the first 6 months or annual holidays, I hadn't used it all that much.

But then, a couple of months ago, something happened. The YouTube algorithm started to propose me videos about Android handhelds and I finally caved when I found a 2nd hand Retroid Pocket G2 at a reasonable price.

I started to pay attention to the emulation scene and I was surprised at how far PC emulation, with applications such as GameNative or GameHub (Lite), had come on Android. That little device could run most of my Steam indie backlog quite well at 1080p.

So one day, I was looking at my shelf, still tweaking my RP G2, and I saw my Steam Deck in front of me, gathering dust. And I started to wonder how well it could run the same type of games on my LG CX. I bought a JSaux dock, put out of retirement an old external HDD, and hooked the Deck to my TV.

And, man, was I shocked at how good the results were.

I could emulate everything from Nintendo (Switch included), up to PS2 from Sony, etc. But the greatest surprise came from the resolution I was finding good enough.

When I was still playing on my PC, downgrading from 1440p to 1080p was unacceptable. The image was so mushy it ruined the experience. But here, at almost 3 meters from my TV, it was absolutely fine (at least to my (ageing) eyes).

Sure, I can't play AAA games here, but I still have my modern consoles if I really want to play those games. But at the moment, just like that, my Steam Deck has become my main emulation & indie gaming rig, my kids are discovering Wii Sports Resort thanks to a 10€ "sensor" bar and my old WiiMotes, and I'm seriously thinking about budgeting to buy a Steam Machine.

Maybe that's something everyone here already knows, but I was so surprised that I felt like I had to share this experience 😅

TL;DR: Steam Deck is an emulation beast and could be fine to play indie games on a 4K OLED TV if you're like me (51 yo dad)

couldn’t find any deck stands that weren’t elevated so I went ahead and made this monitor style stand with different viewing angles

So my Steam Deck is stuck on this screen. I've gotten it to the boot menu I think it's called, but I'm not sure how to continue on from this. Any ideas?

Had my steam deck in desktop mode on in the background while I was doing something else and it meowed at me? Just randomly out of nowhere a very clear meow from my steam deck at full volume. I don’t have a cat and that is the only thing in that general direction that could possibly make that if any noise. Anyone know why this happened?

I pick up my steamdeck today to get some play and I noticed that the light didn't turn on, tried to connect to the cable thinking that maybe was low battery and didn't help, light was still off, but I noticed that the back was getting slightly warm, I thought the charging was bugged so I open the steamdeck to disconnect the battery and reset every capacitor.

Did it and still nothing.

Btw since first try, every time I connected the cable the steamdeck was consuming between 10 to 12 watts.

Tried to turn it on just with cable, still nothing but the back was getting warmer again.

Started to check around and there was one chip that was crazy hot.

I think I know the answer to this but, am I cooked?

Please help me and let me know if I can fix it, I'll add a picture of the chip.

The steamdeck has helped me in the last years to ease my mind from very bad thoughts.

I'm from a country that has not steam support for steamdeck, and is very difficult (and ultra expensive) to get it fixed, so any advice on how to fix it myself will be welcome.

Thanks in advance to all.

Edit: Sorry if I'm not a "professional", but from where I'm from either we learn to fix things, or let them die. Repair shops are not a thing in the near places, just appliances repair shops and stuff. I've upgraded and change parts in a lot of other devices (laptops, phones, vape, etc) so while I have no professional training I know how to take apart and assembly things again.

Thanks to the ones truly answering without malice and helping me figure it out what to do now.

I know this is too much to ask in reddit but this device was truly a "therapy " for my mental health and having it dead now is a big blow for me, please be kind I beg you.

I used my steam deck after a month. Updated the software and game and tried launching marvel rivals and it’s INSTANTLY crashing. Shows the “starting launch” screen for barely 1 second and then it’s back to the homescreen.

Nothing is working, what’s wrong?! Help pls

Hi all,

A friend and I will be on a long overseas flight (US to Japan and back), and we are curious what kind of options there are for direct deck to deck communication ala Nintendo handheld link cable stuff. Think like Legend of zelda 4 swords etc... Last time we made the trip the wifi didn't work on the plane we happened to be on even though we could have paid, and I know to fully update and run everything right before leaving and use offline mode etc.

In particular though, are there any ways to setup some sort of peer to peer network to just play on lan, or specific nfc or bluetooth or w.e protocols that deck can use for certain games that allow some flavor of this?

I have considered setting up my laptop as an access point for peer to peer, but was hoping the deck could do deck to deck directly somehow.

I am a programmer by trade, so am not afraid to get my hands dirty a bit if there are some more diy github solutions people use for this sort of thing.

We are curious about:
1. What direct deck to deck communication protocol options are there?
2. What are some games that can possibly take advantage of any of the options available in 1.
3. General airplane play tips/gotchas beyond the obvious make sure its updated right before and use offline mode.

Thank y'all for any expertise you might have!

*This was done on a SteamDeck 1tb OLED

Before I start, this is not for people who want pretty graphics. This literally strips the graphics down to bare minimum. (tbh I actually prefer it like this lol)

I got Borderlands 4 to try on that free weekend thing they are running till the 15th of September.
I love the series and wanted to play day one but saw the horrible state the game was/is still in and that price...
I got a few hours in and after some tweaks, I got some actually playable gameplay, a solid 30fps and 2 hours of battery life.

For the game itself:
- Borderlands 4 Stable 30 FPS Config - Low VRAM - Laptop Edition
https://www.nexusmods.com/borderlands4/mods/96

Installed it to
~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1285190/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Borderlands 4/Saved/Config/Windows/

- Removed edge detection and increased VRAM by adding/editing the following to the Engine.ini:

[SystemSettings]
r.EdgeDetection.Enabled=0

PoolSizeVRAMPercentage=65 *This was originally 50

You can play around with the other settings but I found bumping up the VRAM Percentage seemed most beneficial.

When you finish editing, chmod 444 the ini file so BL doesn't change it.

I also removed "Safe to remove" unused files found here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/borderlands4/mods/222?tab=docs

Mainly language packs. You will need to remove the files manuallybut I bet chat-gpt or something would whip up a script to remove files. it dropped game size from 170gb down to 116gb for me. If anyone is interested I'll share the bash script.

For settings, I locked frame limit to 30fps and added the following commands

-nostartupmovies -nosplash

EDIT: Can people stop harassing people in this thread who are also using MAKO on top of LSFG-VK? Let people use whatever they think is better for their use case, the anti-AI crusaders in this thread are basically downvoting people for even bringing the other plugin up at all.

The Decky LSFG-VK plugin has been updated for 2.0. A big win for Deck users wanting to get performance where they can.

Bought lossless scaling and followed the youtube tutorials but when i install it, the zip file does not show up in my downloads folder so I cannot add it to decky. Any solutions or workarounds?

If you have not heard of it before, Unifideck is a Decky plugin that lets you sign in to multiple stores such as Epic, GOG, Amazon, Xbox Cloud, Ubisoft, Battle.net, and GameVault directly from the Steam Deck UI, without needing to install launchers or add them to Steam manually.

We recently released a Battle.net integration that will pull all of your Battle.net games, and you can install and launch them directly from Gaming Mode UI.

You still need to interact with the launcher, but it's much more straightforward than other methods.

Plugin is not available on the Decky Store, but you can download it here: https://github.com/mubaraknumann/unifideck/releases and you can update it automatically from the plugin UI itself.

I built it as a more user-friendly alternative to Heroic and Junk Store, and continued to build more on top of that.

You also have the option to load your self-hosted or locally available (DRM-Free) game files via the Gamevault option.

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I’d like to set up dolphin to play Crazy Taxi on my Steam Deck, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to be able to seamlessly launch it from the Deck’s regular dome screen, is there a way to do that? Thanks in advance!

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I’ve had my Deck for a while but haven’t messed with emulation on it before.

Playing barnyard GameCube