Summary
It seems that no matter how hard I try, I can’t escape the Steam Deck. To make sure that I have access to all the games I could possibly want to play, I have an Xbox, a PS5, a Nintendo Switch, and a PC. I’ve made no secret about PC being my least favourite platform – sitting in one spot for hours at a time is a drag, and I like to be able to move around my room freely while I play games. Anything with a controller works great, because I can use one wherever I am. I’ll sit at my PC and use my keyboard and mouse if I have no other choice, but I won’t be happy about it.
The thing is, I own alotof games on Steam, because I’ve had an account from when I was in my mid-teens and I snatch up bundles and deals every time I see them. I have classic RPGs that I’ve never played sitting in my library because they were in a bundle that only cost a couple of dollars, and they’ve never once been booted up. I have countless indies, gifted to me by friends. I have family sharing with my brother, who is an avowed PC gamer, so I have access to his huge library too. I just never play these games. I never want to sit in my chair and play, even though I know I have a massive backlog of games that I’ll never finish if I don’t just sit down and do it.
I am well aware that the Steam Deck could solve all my PC problems. Having a way to play PC games without actually being sat in front of one has always appealed to me, but until recently, I wasn’t a fan of handhelds. I never had any handheld consoles as a kid – my parents were under the impression that only little boys should be able to get addicted to video games, so I wasn’t allowed to have one – and I only started seeing the value of playing games on the gowhen I started using my Nintendo Switch more.
It turns out I quite like having a console to throw in my bag. Playing games on the train feels much more engaging and satisfying than doom-scrolling on Twitter and studiously avoiding eye contact with my fellow passengers. The Steam Deck would be the perfect way for me to play all the indies I want to play, but never seem to have the time to. All those hours I spend commuting from place to place could be better spent gaming.
I’m very wary of saying that every hour I have needs to be productive, but surely anything is better than being on Twitter at this late point in its tailspin toward obsolescence.
And the OLED is a major upgrade. It has significantly more battery life, faster downloads, it’s lighter, and it runs cooler. Most importantly, the OLED screen makes everything look better. Twitter’s algorithm has, for some reason, been feeding me comparison videos of the Steam Deck LCD and OLED, and even my untrained eyes can see a huge difference in the quality of the image.
There are two reasons I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet. One: I can’t find it anywhere. Valve doesn’t ship to Asia, and Komodo, which brings the Steam Deck to Asia, doesn’t include Southeast Asia in the countries it covers. I live in Singapore, which means that I’d have to get the Steam Deck through a middleman. That leads me to my second reason: holy god, it’s expensive. Because I’d have to go through a middleman, I’d be paying almost a thousand Singapore dollars for the 512GB model, and well over a thousand for the 1TB model, the equivalent of a month of rent. But if I bought it in the US, even after currency conversion, I’d save about SGD$400. It’s a huge premium to pay for the privilege of having what’s readily available to the Western market, and itsucks.
But I don’t have any other consoles to buy – this is the last of the things I could possibly want to complete my gaming ecosystem, at least until the Switch 2 or whatever it is comes out. Not to give in to consumerism, but I’ve been seriously considering buying one for years now, and seeing the OLED’s quality has only made me more sure that I want to buy one. Maybe this year will finally be the year I allow myself to get a Steam Deck. If I do, it’ll probably be my biggest gaming purchase of the year.
