Why you shouldn’t buy a Steam Deck yet

Australians can buy Valve’s flagship handheld PC through import sites, but without local pricing and an official release, it’s not worth it yet.

You might have heard of the Steam Deck, a handheld PC that can play a pretty big chunk of the Steam library. If you’re in Australia, you probably shouldn’t buy one — at least not yet.

Valve announced the Steam Deck back in July 2021, at a time when the Nintendo Switch was riding high after a series of huge successes. It promised a new way to play the games you already own on Steam, on the go, in bed or, if you really wanted, on the toilet.

Much like the Nintendo Switch, it was a handheld console with a fairly nice screen, built-in controls, and a few interesting additions like touch pads and capacitive analog stick tips. It wasn’t meant to play games at hundreds of frames per second at absurdly high resolutions like a high-end gaming PC or console would, it was just meant to play games well enough that you’d have a nice time with them.

Because the Deck uses your own existing Steam library, you don’t need to drop hundreds of dollars on games for your shiny new system – you already own them. And since Steam has cloud integration for its game saves, you don’t have to restart your favourite game to keep playing it on the go. Simply sign in, download the game, and continue where you left off.

On its face, it sounds like an appealing product. There are hundreds of glowing reviews. Sure, it has a pretty abysmal battery life if you’re playing a big game, and the screen is nothing to write home about, but the freedom of playing your favourite games wherever you want? Little else can compare to that.

The complications come when you’re living in Australia. Valve isn’t a traditional games company, and it doesn’t have massive, worldwide, physical distribution networks like Nintendo or Sony do. Its focus is software and servers, so anything to do with hardware has bottlenecks when it comes to distribution.

The Steam Deck is not officially available in Australia, leaving customers to buy from marked up grey market importers. Picture: Valve

As such, despite the Steam Deck being available in the US for almost a year now, its availability in other countries is somewhat lacking. The UK and most of Europe have them, Japan and South Korea are just starting to get them now, so it’s not as if it’s only an American thing. But if you’re in Australia, you’re not going to be able to just hop onto the Steam store and order yourself a Deck, at least not anytime soon.

So we come to imports, which are a little messier, but pretty much the only way to get a Steam Deck in Australia short of calling up an American friend and wiring them the cash. There are a few websites that have imported Steam Decks, but pretty much all of them come at a hefty cost.

Take, for example, Catch, which has two variants of the Steam Deck in stock: a 256GB version, and a 512GB version. The one with smaller storage is currently priced at $1016, while the half-terabyte version will set you back $1307. That’s a chunk of change to spend on anything, let alone a handheld console.

Importing a Steam Deck is a pricey endeavour, with the handheld selling well above the market cost. Picture: Catch

In the US, the 256GB model costs $529 USD, or about $750 AUD, while the 512GB model costs $649 USD, a little over $900 AUD. Even when you add the cost of GST, that’s a pretty big mark-up, and it makes it a much more expensive proposition than a lot of other solutions.

For $1300, you could buy a PS5, or an Xbox Series X, and still have enough cash left over to pick yourself up a Nintendo Switch OLED. Or you can spend an extra $100 and get both a PS5 and an Xbox Series X. You could buy four Nintendo Switch Lite consoles and keep one in every room in your house, or you could buy an M1 Mac Mini and have one of the fastest desktop PCs on the market.

You could even buy two of these new PS5 controllers that cost almost $500, and still have some change left over to spend on therapy so you can figure out why you bought two expensive controllers you didn’t really need.

Here’s the kicker though: for the same price, you could buy an actual, honest-to-goodness prebuilt desktop gaming PC from somewhere like PC Case Gear. It won’t be running games in 8K anytime soon, but it’ll probably run games a lot better than the Steam Deck will, plus it can do all the other things a PC can do.

And lest you think I’m forgetting about the portability aspect, that’s covered too. If you want to play full-fat games, there’s a multitude of options for playing games on the go, from the celebrated Nintendo Switch to streaming services like Xbox Game Pass and GeForce Now. You can even play Steam games in your car now, if you’re lucky enough to have a 2022 model Tesla.

The Steam Deck is undoubtedly an impressive piece of kit, but it’s not worth it in Australia yet. Picture: Valve

None of those options can access your Steam Library, but you know what can? Your phone, or your tablet, or your laptop, or even your TV if you’ve got an Android TV. Steam has a little-known feature called Steam Link, and it lets you run games on your home PC and stream them to just about any device you can install an app on. It won’t be a perfect experience, sure, there’s likely to be a little bit of latency — but the Steam Deck wouldn’t be a perfect experience either, it’s just compromised in different ways.

There are use cases for the Steam Deck, it’s not an inherently bad device by any means. If the Steam Deck gets an official launch in Australia at a reasonable price, I’ll be the first in line to buy one. But right now, with the cost of buying an imported model and the dozens of better options for more wisely spending that money? It’s just not worth it.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.