 Last October, I had to make a choice. Do I buy a fancy new Switch OLED model, or wait until next year for an even fancier newer Steam Deck? I chose the Steam Deck because, hey, we've already got a Switch. This was something new. 30 minutes after finally getting my hands on the Steam Deck, I was sure that I'd made a mistake. I did my absolute best to like it. I gave it a good shake, really, I did. For three months, I tried and tried to find a way to fit it into my life. It didn't work. So, with no small amount of disappointment, I walked it round to my local game trading shop and sold it so that I could replace it with an OLED Switch. To be clear, there is nothing really wrong with the Steam Deck, and I know a lot of people, including some friends, who are really getting a lot out of it. Personally, though, it didn't meet my needs, and a recent shift in the way my family plays games has meant that a Nintendo console is just a more useful thing to have in the house. So, what does the Switch do that the Steam Deck doesn't? Before we get into that, I'm going to talk a little bit about this video's sponsor, and then I'll give you my hands-on experience with the deck. This video is sponsored by Drumroll, please, Bloodlines Heroes of Lythus. Oh, new legends will be born. Bloodlines Heroes of Lythus is a mobile game with light sim gameplay that sees you raising up a family of champions in a vast fantasy world. Choose your heirs, marry different bloodlines together, and combine five powerful abilities and dozens of traits to sire your ideal champion. Build a diverse family of Dragonborns, Lycans, Demigods, and more. This epic mobile game is just the thing if you absolutely love unique gacha gameplay. Let's take a look at some of the different types of champions you can find in the game. Wolfie Lycanus, these guys are sleek assassins. The Carg. They can turn into dragons at will. The Fulgar are Demigods. They have the best area of effect spells. Finally, you can use my link in the description to get a very rare half-Dragonborn half-Demigod for free. They are very rare. Heroes of Lythus is a free-to-play mobile game available on Android and Apple. If you use my link in the description, or scan this nifty QR code, you'll start the game with some extra special perks. 20 Intimacy Packs, 100,000 Gold, and 100 Diamonds. That's a $20 value, and you get it just for scanning this code. With that, let's head back to the rest of the video. Now, where was I? Ah yes, all hands on deck. I was one of the first people to pre-order a Steam Deck. It seemed like the device I'd been waiting for my whole life. A convenient handheld PC that let me play all the games that just don't come to console. I've always been a handheld guy. I like small, personal screens. And with young kids in the house, playing games in portable mode has been the best way for keeping small eyes away from, for example, somewhat adult monsters in Persona 5. I played Persona 5 mostly on my PS Vita, connected to the PS4 Vive Remote Play. I wanted a PC I could take on the go, which would play anything and would remove all the faffing about that I always experience with computer gaming. Because somehow every game involves a bit of faff. I distinctly remember struggling for several hours to get Sonic Mania to run on my computer, and that should have been easy. Maybe my computers are just always terrible. Maybe the Danuvo DRM didn't help, but that's another issue. The other thing I wanted was to be able to play weird itch.io games conveniently. I love an indie title, like a true indie title, made by someone in a few weeks for a game jam, or thrown together as a passion project without much budget. These games never come to Switch, but they're glorious, and I want an easier way to play them. I figured a handheld PC would make things nice and simple. When I first got the deck out of the box, I did the usual thing. I marvelled at the size of it, and how loud the fan is, etc etc. Every Steam Deck review has covered this to death. The truth is, the size is cumbersome enough to be detrimental. Not long after receiving my deck, I had a trip to London. I considered bringing the deck with me to entertain myself on the train, but that would have meant carrying this big chunky case around the city all day. No, that was too much effort. I brought my iPad mini instead, and spent the time on the train drawing 8-bit skeletons. Maybe for a game project? Maybe just for fun. They say that the best camera is the one you have with you, and similarly the best handheld is the one that actually fits into your tiny stylish reporter's satchel. In terms of actually playing on the Steam Deck though, this thing is incredibly comfortable. Honestly, it's big, yes, but it's designed for an adult human's hand, which is something I've never felt about any Joy-Con configuration. I have never liked the size and shape of the native Switch controls, which is again probably why I've been perfectly happy with just the Switch Lite, until recently I find that more comfortable for being a little bit smaller. The Steam Deck is way better for actually playing for long periods of time, so while I wouldn't consider the deck very portable, it is comfortable as a device for playing around the home in bed, on the couch, at my desk. It's fantastic. This alone would be enough to sell me on it were it not for the bigger issues I have with the software. Remember, I got one of the first Steam Decks. The software that it shipped with, pre-update, was somewhat lacking. There wasn't even a sleep function while in desktop mode. It's my feeling that the Steam Deck will be perfect in a year or two. The software just isn't quite ready yet. If you're low down the pre-order list, you're actually just skipping the awkward trial period while Steam OS gets all its kinks hammered out. I have two major issues with the software. First, Proton. Proton is the magic that I don't entirely understand, which lets the Steam Deck play Windows games on its Linux operating system. It's a marvel. Truly it is. It's a straight-up miracle that any of these games run as well as they do. As such, it feels like griping to complain about the few games that don't work, but complain I must because it always seems to end up being the games I wanted to play. The challenge, I discovered, is that most of the commercially released games that I want to play are on the Switch already. I had a hard time finding PC exclusive titles in Steam that I actually wanted to play. I had a go at Horizon Zero Dawn, which I could have played on PS4, yes, but handheld mode just suits me better, and that was fun, and probably the thing that taxed the deck most of anything that I tried. The big ticket item, Elden Ring, is probably great on the deck, but I just don't have time for an open-world Souls game. I'm sorry, I just can't bring myself to try it. I'm an extremely busy dad, so the prospect of a game that involves me getting beaten to a pulp over and over and over until I get good just isn't what I'm looking for from my gaming time. After trying out a bunch of different stuff, I finally found a game that I wanted to play, Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic 2. Regular viewers of the channel might remember that I often call myself Kotor, and that's because once upon a time I used to make Knights of the Old Republic fan comics, and the name kind of stuck. If there's one thing that the Steam Deck does perfectly for me, it's retro gaming. Kotor 2 fit particularly well because I could even install the fan-made restored content mod that fills in all the bits of deleted stuff that had to be cut from the official release. I even went so far as to record a version of this video wherein I said that Kotor 2 with this mod was the one thing that the Deck had over the Switch. I had to scrap that video because, while I was editing it, Aspere Media announced that Kotor 2 would be ported to the Switch and that the restored content mod was coming as additional DLC. So back to square one. Although at least the Steam version of the game already has this mod and doesn't have a game-breaking bug. Side note, I don't rate Aspere Media very highly. Of the non-switch, non-weird indie games that I wanted to try, top of the list was The Forgotten City. I mean it's kind of a weird indie game in and of itself as it grew out of a Skyrim mod but you get the point. This was my kind of game. A glorious walking simulator where I stroll around, chat to some NPCs, uncover a mystery of some sort. I don't know, I haven't actually played it because it's one of the few games to be marked as unplayable on the Steam Deck. It just doesn't run. Some games are verified like Sonic Mania. Some games are playable but require a little fiddling like Sonic Adventure 2 which expects you to manually select gamepad controls before starting the game. It's fine, it's not a big deal. Some games like Sonic Adventure DX just don't start up at all. I have no idea why not. The Forgotten City apparently just doesn't work. Another game that doesn't work is Worms WMD. I know this because my friends wanted to play it but I couldn't join in because it doesn't run on Steam Deck. For a while there it felt like every key game I wanted to play just wouldn't start. Minute I wanted to play. I have a DRM free Linux copy but doesn't work. Superhot I have on itch.io? Doesn't work. You have to do some fiddling to get non-Steam games to run but it's hidden miss. Plus it involves using the Linux desktop which I despise. Linux and I have a troubled history. When I was a teenager my dad had a computer company. What exactly he did? I don't know, I'll never know. But it involved him replacing computers at local businesses and then bringing home all their scraps. In his spare time, after long days of setting up computer networks he would set up computer networks. He'd fix up these old PCs and connect them to our home network which soon featured twice as many PCs as there were people in the house. Naturally, because Linux is free and Windows is expensive, dad would always install Linux on these computers and I hated it. I would for example start some homework on a computer at school then bring it home on a floppy disk and then I would be unable to continue it because OpenOffice either didn't like the .docx file or reformatted the entire thing so that any pictures I'd placed in my schoolwork were thrown around at random into the margins of the page. Plus, Linux couldn't run macromedia flash and this was the program that I was the most excited to learn at the time and which started me on my career of making digital art and videos which has led me to YouTube. So maybe Linux was just trying to save me from myself? Anyway, returning to Linux after a 20-year hiatus I've got to say all the same issues are still there. I love the theory behind Linux, an open source operating system that can be completely customized and is developed by passionate amateurs for the benefit of the whole community. The thing is though you get what you pay for, especially in terms of quality assurance testing. Microsoft has a budget to make the Windows UI a little more friendly and personally I really feel that when switching between the two operating systems. This is especially apparent on touchscreen devices. My main computer at the moment is a Surface Pro which is probably why I have so many issues trying to get games to run on it. Either way, I use the touch controls all day long and they're nicely intuitive, although I prefer Windows 8 to Windows 10 if I'm honest. I haven't tried Windows 11 yet because I've got no strong loyalty to Microsoft whatever this video might have you thinking and I don't trust that Windows 11 won't somehow ruin my 2019 surface in new and exciting, unforeseen ways. The Steam Deck's gaming mode, which it boots into initially, is pretty decent. It's simple, straightforward, a little clumsy in places but mostly okay. Sometimes though I need to adjust a setting or enter a Steam key, which for some reason you can't do in gaming mode, or I just want to record some gameplay footage for a video and OBS won't run in gaming mode either. So I swap over to desktop mode and begin an exercise in frustration. The version of Linux that the Steam Deck runs is not yet optimized for gamepad and touchscreen controls, which is a problem because those are the controls the Steam Deck has. The Steam Deck doesn't have a button keyboard or a mouse, official guidance is you need to plug a keyboard and mouse into this thing in order to work in desktop mode, which is not ideal. Somehow even with two trackpads, two analog sticks, and a touchscreen, simple things like dragging and dropping files is a tremendous chore on the Deck. I don't understand it. There are so many control schemes and somehow none of them work 100% of the time. You need a keyboard and mouse. That makes no sense. The piezda resistance for me was trying to get some gameplay footage for our Sonic 3 Simon Thomni video from the Deck and onto my PC so that I could put it into the video I was editing. The natural option would have been to upload it to the cloud and then download it again, but my neighbours must have been playing Halo Infinite or something because my bandwidth was non-existent. So, can I save the file to the microSD card, pop it out, and then put it into my computer for a simple offline file transfer? Nope! Because something about the way the Steam Deck formats its memory cards means that it's entirely incompatible with Windows, so I had to wait three hours for the file to upload and then slowly download again. This isn't strictly the Steam Deck's fault, not only the Steam Deck's fault, but it's an indication of the kind of challenges I've faced with this thing every time I've tried to use it for work. I thought this would be a useful tool for helping me to make new different kinds of videos. It turns out it's much easier to get the files between the iPad that I use for drawing and the PC that I use for video editing. The Steam Deck is somehow less compatible with Windows than an Apple product, and that is bizarre to me. I could have put Windows on the Deck, in theory. Doing so now though would have lost me the use of Steam OS, and without its keyboard and mouse this thing wouldn't let me, for example, suspend a game or exit a game conveniently. Eventually the Steam Deck will get dual support for Windows and Steam OS at the same time so that you can swap back and forth between the two, get the benefits of one and the benefits of the other, and at that point it might be more suitable for my personal needs. I do have faith that the Deck is getting better. The whole time that I had the thing, regular updates brought a variety of quality of life improvements that made a genuine difference to how comfortable and convenient the thing was to play and use. As I said, if you're on the waiting list for one of these things, there are advantages to not being an early adopter. There is nothing wrong with letting other people be the guinea pigs and then reaping the benefits and having a far more stable and comfortable experience once you finally get hold of the thing. This glimmer of hope for the future though doesn't fix the fact that in its current incarnation the Steam Deck just isn't right for me right now. Instead it's clear that I actually need another switch. It's my daughter's fault really. That's probably enough of an explanation for most parents watching, but bear with me. As I said, personally I've always been a handheld fan and with a baby in the house the switch light always seemed like the best option for me. I could play privately, quietly without accidentally giving my kids unwanted screen time or showing the many games I'd rather they didn't see. Now though, my daughter is seven, obsessed with Splatoon and Zelda and very eager to play as many games as possible, ideally with other people. I mean yes, she plays in handheld mode in her bedroom a lot by herself and that's not ideal because what we can do is all play together staring at the TV and suddenly gaming time is not an antisocial activity. It is something that we can enjoy as a family. It's good family time. At the moment we've been going retro if you want to call it retro and I know not everybody likes that description. We must be the only family left in the world that still plays the Wii U as much as we do. We're still getting a lot out of it. Gaming for me has gone from being a solitary experience to a family bonding activity. In fact, my daughter played the Wii U so much that she wore out the gamepad charging cable and I had to buy a new one on eBay. Then I had to buy a second one when the first one turned out to be dodgy because Nintendo's retro support just ain't what it used to be. Currently there is only one thing on my daughter's mind, Splatoon 3. We get a daily countdown as if waiting for Christmas. Every day she'll tell us just how desperate she is for the game. Here's the thing though. I don't want my daughter playing online games on the Switch Lite. I don't feel comfortable with that. Splatoon isn't even the issue, it's whatever comes next. The Fortnite's or the Among Us's of the world. Once there's a precedent for my daughter playing online games in her bedroom by herself we can't take that back. Currently she plays the original Splatoon on Wii U but it's clear just how much Splatoon 3 means to her. So we need a Switch that plugs into the TV for her to play. This also means opening up a lot of other options for us. I know not everybody loved it but I am probably the person that Let's Go Pikachu was made for. One thing I've been looking forward to is playing a relaxed, casual multiplayer Pokémon RPG with my daughter but I've held off because it just wouldn't be comfortable in handheld mode, with both of us crowding around the screen. We have played some games together on the Switch Lite like this, most recently Kirby and the Forgotten Land but let me tell you it is not a comfortable experience. My back hurts. So we need a new Switch, one with HDMI out. It might as well be an OLED model, I'd prefer to future-proof a bit, and if I am ever going to play it in handheld mode again I might do, I'd like it to be a very nice screen. If I really feel like splashing out we could get the limited edition Splatoon 3 Switch. I've never had a novelty Nintendo console before, it could be fun. So it made sense to me. Sell the Steam Deck by a Switch. Maybe I'll revisit the handheld PC world in a few years once all the wrinkles have been ironed out. All of this isn't to say that the Steam Deck isn't good, there's nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't fit my lifestyle. It turns out that, at the moment, I actually need something that I can play with my daughter, and that is more important than being able to play weird indie games myself. The moral of the story, everyone has their own preferences. Sometimes something that seemed perfect on paper just doesn't fit, and that's okay. I hope that my old Steam Deck goes to a good home, with someone who will actually make the most of it.