What the Steam Deck does that your PC doesn’t

digitaltrends.com:

In a conversation about the Steam Deck at a party last weekend, one guy said something that’s stuck with me since: “I want one, but I’ve got a PC. I just keep telling myself that.”

It’s an entirely valid point. The Steam Deck is irresistible to anyone who’s got even a little bit of gadget-hound in them; it’s a whole gaming PC that fits in a carry-on, and Valve has gone on the record as saying that, once you buy a Deck, it doesn’t care what you do with it. The possibilities are endless, especially if you’re the sort of person who’s still using that PlayStation Vita you modded six years ago.

On the other hand, if you’ve put the time, money, and work in to be a dedicated PC player, you’ve already got a PC that can run a lot of the games in your Steam library, and statistically, it’s probably a laptop. The Deck might be more convenient, but are you really willing to spend a few hundred bucks for that slight degree of convenience?

Well, yes. More importantly, though, there are a few things that the Steam Deck has going for it that your gaming PC doesn’t, some of which don’t necessarily apply to you. There are some cases beyond its basic portability, in fact, where the Deck is a legitimately superior option.

One of the quieter conversations the video game industry is having recently is the overall cost of entry. Anyone who wants to get into non-mobile gaming for whatever reason has to invest a substantial amount of money upfront, especially if they’re looking to buy a decent gaming PC.

The cheaper models of Steam Deck go a long way toward addressing that. The 64GB and 256GB Decks are comparable in price to older smartphones, and while the relatively small hard drives are an issue, they’ve got enough processing power to handle