The Steam Deck has ruined console gaming for me

digitaltrends.com:

When the Steam Deck first launched, I was a skeptic. I loved the idea of Valve’s handheld PC, but thought that its low battery life and frequent bugs would limit how much I used it. Since then, the device has only gotten better (especially thanks to a significantly improved OLED model) and it has eaten a bigger chunk of my gaming time since then.

But I didn’t realize just how much it was outright replacing my consoles.

That revelation began last week when I powered on my PlayStation 5 to downloadThe First Descendant. It’s a beefy looter shooter built with online play in mind, so it’s not the kind of thing I’d want to run on a portable machine. When I turned my PS5 on, I was momentarily confused. It said that the most recent game I had played was Stellar Blade. That couldn’t have been right. The last time I touched that was in the first week of May. Surely I must have played something on the console in the past two months?

I hadn’t, and I started to realize that the same was true of some of my other devices. I hadn’t actually used my Xbox Series X to play a game since Hauntii in May (I’d also played Still Wakes the Deep, but entirely via cloud streaming through my Samsung TV’s Game Pass app). Even my PC was taking a hit, I realized. Aside from playing a preview builds of Dustborn and Cygni: All Guns Blazing last month, I hadn’t played a game at my computer since Cryptmaster in early May. According to my own personal record keeping, I’ve played around 100 games in 2024 (not including previews). Only around 23 of those have been played on PS5, Xbox Series X, or PC combined.

The only device that’s holding strong is my Nintendo Switch, which still gets consistent use thanks to the steady stream of exclusives that Sony and Microsoft lack. Even then, no single device is getting nearly the play time that my Steam Deck is. I’ve played 15 games on Nintendo Switch this year, my second most played platform. By comparison, I’ve played 52 on my Steam Deck OLED. Nothing even comes