 Our full embargo has lifted and in just six days, the Steam Deck will ship to end users in a state that can only be described as unfinished, which puts me in an awkward position as a reviewer. On the one hand, I want to be optimistic. The kind of zeal with which Valve is tackling this project is like nothing I've ever witnessed in all my time covering technology. They're on a mission to change the industry come hell or high water. And it's no secret that I'm rooting for them. Every major player in the console gaming space, I'm looking at you, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony, has made enough blatantly anti-consumer moves over the years that I can't help but cheer for a disruptor. On the other hand, I can't review the hypothetical Steam Deck of tomorrow, one with Windows drivers and improved UI and better game compatibility. If it's shipping as is, I have to evaluate it as is. And I'm gonna be doing it a little differently than you might expect. See, this thing has the capability to be treated like a science fair project. You can tweak it, break it, reformat it, start over. And Valve is embracing that. Good guy, Valve. But most people aren't gonna do any of that. So today, I'm gonna be focusing on the out-of-box console experience. So ready or not, Valve? Here I come. This video is brought to you by dbrand, the most trustworthy criminals on the internet. Over the past few weeks, we've been testing out dbrand screen protectors for the Steam Deck. As it turns out, the thickness of ordinary tempered glass inhibits touch sensitivity. Don't believe everything you see on Amazon. dbrand's tempered glass screen protectors for the Steam Deck are guaranteed to be super precise and work on your display. Check them out below. Now, I could have spent the last couple of weeks laser focused on running countless benchmarks on the Steam Deck. But really, the bottom line is this. At its starting price of $400 US, the hardware in the Steam Deck is literally impossible. The internals of this thing put it in the same performance class as Ultrabooks that cost twice or even up to three times as much. And if it's a title in Steam's game library, the deck is almost certainly capable of running it at 60 FPS if you're willing to turn down the details. And that colossal back catalog is both its greatest strength and its biggest question mark. I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit though. Firing up the Steam Deck cold takes just a few seconds. Now let's get logged into a Steam account. You'll need to be online for this obviously and take a tour of the interface. At launch, all the basics are pretty well covered and I was surprised at how self-explanatory just about every menu was. Home here contains your recently launched games, news, and recommended picks from your library based on the tastes of gamers with a similar profile. One surprisingly jarring feature for me on this page was the friends tab. I mean, it's a pretty simple feed of games that your friends are playing and recent events. You can see mine is empty because I don't have any friends. And you can chat with them to play together or view a game that you don't already own in the store. That's just pretty normal stuff, right? But what it's surged to highlight is the Steam Deck's online first design. And I couldn't help feeling looking at this like the Switch is suddenly this relic of a different gaming era. The rest of the main menu is accessed using the Steam button. You can hold it by the way, for a comprehensive list of useful shortcuts or chords. Then from here, you can use any of the four methods of navigation, joystick, D-pad, touch pad, or touch screen to arrive at your destination. And wherever that destination is, there's a pretty good chance that you're gonna find some, let's call them growing pains. All right, then let's pretend I'm a brand new customer who doesn't own any Steam games and I head straight for the store. No, not that store, although they do have excellent water bottles and those pads there. To Valve's credit, this has already improved a lot. In fact, it was part of a big long list of improvements that Valve sent me just minutes before we sat down to film this video. But fortunately, I caught this one already. I had this whole thing written up about how the closest thing to a Steam Deck verified page in the store was the SteamOS slash Linux heading under the categories tab that frankly reminds me of the reasons that Nintendo introduced their Seal of Quality program back in the 80s. Like honestly, Climb Fall Human guys? Really? I wonder if it's a Fall Guys ripoff. One of the new and trending games was like Elf Wives Cheat to Ride My Meat. Fortunately, that mess has been papered over with a proper great on-deck header that allows you to browse titles that are verified to run flawlessly by category, popularity, ratings, discounts, all the usual fare. And this is hugely important because for those who haven't been closely following Steam Deck news, it runs a modified version of Arch Linux called SteamOS. And game compatibility relies either on the developer to build a Linux native version of their game or this super cool compatibility layer called Proton or Steam Play. So this is great, but there's a bit of a navigation problem here, Valve. Where on earth is the comprehensive list of Deck verified games? You've got this wonderful page on your website outlining the four different tiers of compatibility, verified, playable with tweaks or workarounds, unsupported and unknown, but nowhere on the official site, or more importantly, in the store, can I just browse a comprehensive list of every game that works on the Deck. And whatever the reason is for this obfuscation, I don't care. It's a terrible user experience. My first Google hit for a workaround was this list on digital trends from a few days ago, which led me down a rabbit hole to steamdeckverified.avery.cafe, a totally credible sounding site that scrapes the SteamDB database for verified status flags and then makes them easily searchable. Big props to the community maintainers of both of these projects, but my gratitude towards them doesn't change the fact that neither of them should be necessary if Valve is on top of these things. I'm sure they're gonna get this sorted out in time, but considering that Valve's core competency is supposedly selling games through a digital storefront, it just struck me as a little ironic that I encountered everything from slow page loading to titles not highlighting as I was scrolling, making it so that I had to navigate out of the store and come back to it and figure out where I left off, to this confusing compatibility error message that I got while trying to download the demo of a Steam Deck verified game. I mean, given the importance of selling games to balance out Valve's aggressive hardware pricing, I hope that the plan is to get this in order as soon as possible. Or maybe the plan is just to allow me to buy additional copies of games that I already own. While I'm at it, by the way, one more gripe is that while I don't mind the store reloading if I haven't looked at it in a while, if I'm quickly switching back and forth between my library, it would be really nice if it remembered what page I was on. It's really frustrating. Heading into the library, things take a turn for the better. I installed a one terabyte micro SD card and found that while I didn't always get a prompt for which storage device I wanted to use, it is super simple to transfer games to the internal SSD and vice versa. And depending on the game, I saw download speeds over Wi-Fi of anywhere from 30 to 40 megabytes per second and closer to 60 to 70 with spikes to a hundred using a USB type-C dongle. That's those Zen 2 cores going to work. Love it. And the game library inspired by Steam Big Picture is delightful, mostly. In here, we'll find a mishmash of games that I bought years ago, ones that I picked up more recently to enjoy on the deck and pretty much every other unknown status game that I tried was a big fat negatory. The good news is that according to the third party resources, the number of verified games has been absolutely skyrocketing, including many games that I would actually want to play while I wait for some of my favorites to arrive. And more good news, every verified game I tried with the exception of Fez, which I had some crashing issues with, was a smooth enough experience that I would simply never even know that I wasn't on Windows. Smoother actually in some cases. Let's talk about some really cool stuff the Steam Deck does better than a Windows handheld. Say I'm on the bus gaming away and boom, we're at my stop. Look at that sleep speed. Now I'm walking down the street ready to continue and bam. Xbox, sure, but I'd like to see a Windows PC do that. How about sleep battery drain? In our rough estimation, it appears that the Steam Deck loses about 10% of battery every 24 hours in sleep. It's not quite Apple level, I mean, what is, but it's miles better than most Windows laptops. Okay, so now I'm in my game here, right? I'm just farming some wild boars or something. And I want to hang out in voice chat without going through the hassle of installing Discord in desktop mode or whatever. Steam menu, friends, voice chat, and man, let me put it this way. I accidentally gave Linus a call in the middle of the night while playing around with this menu. And we were both blown away by the progress Valve has made with audio compression in recent years. And adding icing to the cake, he described the mic quality on the Steam Deck as mid-tier, which is high praise indeed for a microphone on a $400 handheld that's a couple of feet from your face. Here's a quick sample of the Steam Deck's microphone through Steam Voice Chat. And here's a quick recording of the Steam Deck's microphone through Discord. The one challenge we ran into was during intense scenes, the game's audio could break through Valve's attempts at canceling it out. But the solution to this was as simple as either boosting the call volume or lowering the game volume, resulting in a really excellent social experience. All without Nintendo Gold, Xbox Gold, PS whatever. Thank you very much, Valve. Honestly though, as a friendless person, it's the quick access menu over here. These three dots that impresses me the most. Whether you're in a menu or mid-game, the quick settings menu is full of all kinds of goodies. You got your notifications. Yeah, nothing really that interesting there. A way to more quickly access your friends and you've got your quick settings. In here, you can adjust screen brightness and you will want to do it this way. Not a huge fan of Valve's auto brightness. I think it needs some work. You can adjust your rumble and haptics, which by the way are still unamazing because they don't have dedicated hardware for it. But both of them are greatly improved through updates since our hardware review. And you can prioritize your connected controllers, toggle your wireless radios, all that good stuff. Bluetooth audio, by the way, for those who are bitter about years of Nintendo apathy, was completely painless with both my LG Tone Free FP8s and my AirPods Pros and I didn't try much else. Then there's the boring tab, the battery tab that, sorry, did I say boring? I meant the opposite of that. This is the coolest one. And it is time for the rest of the console industry to sit up and take notes. That right there is an integrated performance monitor based on Mango HUD. And it's time for a bit of a side story. You could argue that Microsoft has good coverage of the consumer spectrum, windows for enthusiasts and tinkerers and Xbox OS for normie gamers. But what they don't do a good job of is bridging this gap. And when I contacted them asking for a temperature readout for the Xbox Series X, for example, they acted like I was from the moon. An FPS counter? Why would you want that? More like what are you trying to hide? This is in stark contrast to Valve's approach here, which appears to be, well, I don't know, man. I mean, it's your thermal diode. I assume you want the value that's outputting, right? Damn straight. I mean, why pretend that a performance issue isn't real, creating confusion among consumers when you could just give the enthusiasts the tools that they need to diagnose it for you and better yet, probably solve. I mean, it's beyond the scope of the video today, but the Fox is a wizard when it comes to tuning FPS, thermal and power limits in these handhelds to optimize performance and battery life to the point where he was actually able to beat Valve's estimates. So if you wanna learn more about why this tab is so cool, you can go check out his shiz, all right? The dumbest part of this traditional console opacity is that enthusiast grade diagnostics are such an obviously powerful business tool. And when Steam Deck 2 comes out, it's gonna be trivially simple for gamers to compare performance, which is a powerful upsell mechanism that it is baffling to me that everybody else doesn't wanna leverage. So this is the proof that you can build something for the hard cores under the hood and then also keep it clean for the normies that never wanna look at any of that stuff. I actually get a lot of BMW vibes to be honest. Great hardware, fantastic out of box experience, definitely some quirks, but also a ton of thought that goes into weird edge cases. For example, I ran an update and while the deck was rebooting, I went out of network range. So it got a little confused for a few seconds when it turned back on, then it kinda went, oh, okay, I guess we don't have network. Just dumped me in the profile selection screen, I clicked on it and boom, I was on the homepage. I mean, Valve has had a much better offline experience than many other platforms for years and that work is paying off in spades here. One of the biggest challenges that they faced with the Steam Deck is handling cloud saves with a portable device. So to address this, they introduced a technology that allows seamless saving across devices and that sounds great. For the future, got to run to the can, take your deck with you, all done, pick up where you left off on your desktop. For the moment though, things are a little more fludgy. To demonstrate, let's abruptly suspend a game session here. The deck goes to sleep, we go to launch that same game on desktop and oops, we get a prompt warning us that we could lose progress if we continue. Waking the deck, closing the game and putting it back to sleep resolves the issue, but it's not particularly elegant for the moment. And there are still quite a few rough edges. Here are a couple of navigation annoyances, for example. The keyboard doesn't roll over horizontally. Oh, and my precious quick access menu. This one drives me absolutely crazy. As you are scrolling through the sub menus here, okay, if you go all the way down, it doesn't go into the next parent menu, obviously, cause that would be stupid. But if you go up, it just carries all the way through. Some consistency would be nice here. But I'm sure Valve is gonna see this and fix everything that I've talked about before any customer actually gets the device in their hands, which leads us perfectly into a huge discussion point. We've almost completely glossed over some massive elephants in the room. We've hardly even touched on game compatibility, especially with third-party launchers and anti-cheat schemes. And that's for good reason. We just don't feel like it should be our focus today. It's not perfect today, no doubt. Much of both of our Steam libraries are either entirely incompatible or have issues. But the Steam Deck needs to be evaluated for what it is, not what we wish it could be. It's a console, which means it's compatible with the games it's compatible with, but unlike any other console in history, it's fluent. Using a compatibility tool like Lutris means it's entirely conceivable that a gamer could flip over to desktop mode on the Steam Deck and fire up Anno 1800 using the touchpads. But unless they're willing to put in the work and maybe tolerate some inconveniences, like the fact that multiplayer doesn't seem to work at all despite a gold rating on ProtonDB, it's just not gonna be the kind of experience that most gamers are after, which is why we feel that most people should probably look at Valve's verified list, or somebody else's, and make their own decision. It's an easy one for us. We're in. If you're on the fence but have a gaming PC, fear not, because for games that don't yet run natively or through Proton, Steam Remote Play on the Deck is probably the best, most responsive game streaming setup I've ever used. It's straight up outstanding, and we don't say that a lot. But we'll also be looking at some of the more hacky use cases in more detail in the future once Valve's had a little bit more time to not complete the Steam Deck. Ah yes, we're back to that. What might surprise you about our it's incomplete take is that Valve agrees. Obviously they've been hard at work refining the experience and the lead up to the consumer launch. Nobody wants to embarrass themselves. But they also have no intention whatsoever of stopping here. It's frustrating because it means consumers are expected to take whatever Valve offers today and trust that someday it'll live up to the vision. But it's also encouraging because it means that, looking at it like a console, once we've worked through the generous 400 some odd game launch titles, there's hope that it's going to be better for years to come. And honestly, I'm hopeful. And with that in mind, I want to immerse myself in the Steam Deck experience, and I'm going to be switching to it as my only computer for a month, starting today. During that time, I hope to explore the desktop experience, browser games. Apparently controller support is coming to a Chrome update, which sounds super cool. Third party game stores, GOG for example, as Outright said, we're not going to support it, but maybe there could be workarounds for non-validated games. I want to look at the Windows experience. Actually Windows might end up being a separate video. I don't know about that. So it's incomplete, but I'm not complaining. I mean, I spent my whole life as a gamer asking for someone to take the guardrails off my console and let me do whatever I want with it. Understanding that there might be some pickups along the way, and someone finally did it. So if you're like me, you can see that Valve took the rougher path here, but damn it, that's our path, and I couldn't be happier. So keep your pre-orders, ladies and gentlemen, because you're going to absolutely love this thing. Like you'll love our sponsor, Linode. This video is sponsored by Linode, a powerful Linux-based cloud computing service that's affordable and easy to use. They have a large marketplace with one-click apps to quickly deploy servers for website development, file hosting, database management, video hosting, or even video game servers. And you can even go DIY if you want a full custom setup. They offer affordable pricing with no hidden fees that try to sneak onto your monthly bill. And best of all, Linode has worldwide data centers and 100% human 24-7, 365 customer service that's reachable by phone, email, or social media. With all this, it's easy to see why they're the top-rated infrastructure as a service provider on G2, and you can set up your own server today and get $100 60-day credit on your new account at linode.com slash Linus. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out some of our early Steam Deck coverage. We're gonna have that links down below.