On Decking While Everyone Is Switching

Why I bought a Steam Deck during Switch 2 release week, and what that means for the Substack.

Meet My Steam Deck.

While over 3.5 million people bought a Nintendo Switch 2, I opted to buy a used Steam Deck LCD with 256GB storage. It cost me 250€, which ended up being less than half of the Switch 2 + Mario Kart bundle where I live (509,99€).

This decision took me a while to make, but it ended up being obvious for two main reasons:

• Money- The Nintendo Switch 2 is expensive. 469,99€ makes it only 30€ cheaper than the PS5 Slim Digital. To make matters worse, Nintendo raised the MSRP for Switch 2 releases. 80€ games from a publisher who seems hell-bent on never discounting anything beyond 20% off (79,99-20%=63,99. So even at 20% off the new games will cost more than Switch 1 title MSRP) is too much, at least for Portuguese wallets. With 870€ monthly being the minimum wage in my country, spending nearly 10% of that on a videogame is unjustifiable for most people.

• Backlog- Not only was the used Steam Deck I purchased much cheaper, it also technically comes with a ton of free games. I have a shamefully filled backlog with dozens of ignored videogames that I have now started tackling using the Deck as a perfect excuse. To make matters better, Steam frequently hosts insane sales, almost ensuring that despite my efforts, my backlog will at best remain remain equally packed with games in the near future.

• Bonus Reason- Seeing fellow writers like Margot over at Margot Plays Video Games share their great experiences with the Steam Deck pushed me over the edge (in a good sense!).

My experience with the Steam Deck so far has been excellent. I’ve tried Death Stranding, Bayonetta, L.A. Noire, Dishonored, Nine Sols. All of these have looked and ran great, with even Death Stranding keeping a steady 30FPS with little to no hiccups.

The console is comfortable to play on, more-so than the Switch OLED in my experience, has great-sounding speakers and an incredibly crisp screen, even though mine is LCD. Battery life is decent and the amount of control you have over your system— wattage, GPU clocks, performance overlays, per-game profiles— is fantastic and puts Nintendo to shame. If you couldn’t tell already, I am mainly a PC gamer, so I truly cherish the kind of customization and freedom that Valve brought over from that platform to the handheld market.

Meet Willow, the prettiest baby.

I eventually landed on L.A. Noire as my current main Steam Deck game, which brings me to the next point: what this means for Button Musher.

Following the footsteps of the aforementioned Margot, James over at Adventures in Indie Gaming, and Baby Gamer aka Laura Bibby— all three of these cover indies or older titles, among other things, which are the two types of games in which the Steam Deck truly shines for me—, I’ve decided to start a column in which I’ll review games that I played only on my Steam Deck.

The first edition of the column, which I’ll name Steaming The Deck, will be on L.A. Noire, a fantastic title that had been collecting digital dust on my Steam library for 7 years. Do let me know if you have any recommendations of Indies (new and old) or older titles for me to test on my Steam Deck and I’ll try to check them out!