Why I'm Selling My Steam Deck

I wanted to love it. Everyone loves it. The YouTube algorithm kept putting it in my face. "The best handheld gaming device ever made." "Steam Deck changed how I play." "You NEED one of these."

So I bought one. Right when they first launched. Played it a bit. Sat in a drawer a lot.

And now, I'm selling it.

The Hype

Let's be fair. The Steam Deck is a good piece of kit. Valve made something genuinely impressive — a portable PC that plays your Steam library on the toilet. The screen's decent. The controls are solid. The fact that it exists at all is kind of remarkable.

I watched the reviews. I read the Reddit threads. I saw people playing Elden Ring on a train and thought yeah, that's for me. I'm a gamer. I like handhelds. I grew up with Game Boys. I don't have time to sit and play Xbox or a gaming rig but I can have half an hour in bed playing Total War: Thrones of Britannia (my gaming genre of choice). This is my world.

So I bought one, downloaded a bunch of stuff I'd been meaning to play, and sat down to have the time of my life.

The Reality

Here's what actually happened.

I'd pick it up, scroll through my library for ten minutes, and play something I wasn't really that into. Not because I wanted to play it. Because I'd already turned the thing on and I felt like I should.

Or I'd start a game, play for twenty minutes, and realise I'd rather be doing something else. But the Steam Deck was there, and I'd committed to it, so I'd keep playing. Not enjoying. Just playing.

And here's the thing. When you've got an hour before bed, you don't have the bandwidth to commit to something that needs three hours of your attention. And when you've got a bit longer, you don't always want to spend 45 minutes coming 22nd on a battle map. Neither of those is a gaming session. They're just time spent. And the games that ask for that kind of commitment don't respect your time. They respect their own revenue stream.

The battery life meant I had to plan around it. The weight meant my arms got tired after an hour. The fan meant I kept my wife awake at night. And the library — my whole Steam library, hundreds of games — wasn't a blessing. It was a menu I'd scroll through like Netflix at midnight, unable to commit to anything.

The Steam Deck gave me access to everything and made none of it feel special.

The Moment I Knew

I was lying on the sofa, scrolling through my games list for the third time that afternoon, and I thought — I'd rather be painting.

Not painting a Warhammer mini. Not painting anything in particular. Just painting. Because when I paint, I sit down, I pick a model, I focus on it, and two hours disappear. No scrolling. No choice paralysis. Just one thing, done well, that I chose on purpose.

The Steam Deck was the opposite of that. It was infinite choice with zero commitment. And infinite choice isn't freedom. It's just a different kind of stuck.

What I Did Instead

I'm selling it for the AYN Thor.

I still play games. A friend of mine was hyped to play Pokemon FireRed on the Switch and that sparked something. I loved Pokemon as a kid. I remember playing Pokemon Blue on my Game Boy Colour, sat in the car at Christmas, only being able to see anything when the streetlights flashed across the window. I was invested. I wanted to play it again. I wanted something portable because I wanted to be able to play in short bursts wherever I am.

I bought an emulator and my perspective shifted. I played retro games and found that those games were built for short bursts of play. I booted up Pokemon Blue and immediately knew what to do. The muscle memory was still there. I grabbed Bulbasaur (the only correct choice of starter Pokemon) and knew who I wanted for my team. I explored the game like it was a childhood town I still remembered living in.

Then my son saw my new handheld and asked me: "Dad, do you still have anything from when you were a kid? Can I play on it?"

Well. It hit me. The loft. I was sure I had something up there. Boom. I found it. My old Game Boy Advance and a DSi. With my old cartridges. I knew it was too good to be true but I threw some batteries in the Game Boy and booted it up. Sound, no picture. Bugger. I thought I was scuppered but after a quick search and unscrewing the device, I found the issue. The screen ribbon had come unseated. Fixed it and I was on a roll!

God. What an awful experience. How did I forget there was no backlight on the Game Boy Advance? My son looked at it, played it for two minutes, but the screen was such a barrier neither of us wanted to use it. Well I wasn't going to let that ruin things. I found the modding scene was booming and bought a new backlight screen, a new case, and a USB-C charging pack. Welcome to the 21st century. Now it comes around with me everywhere while I try and complete Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars. I'm discovering games I didn't know existed and missed out on all this time.

The DSi? I bought that at the time on a whim to, guess what, play Pokemon. It worked fine but I knew it could be more. I went on a software journey to mod that guy and now have a fully functioning modern-day DSi where I'm working my way through Ace Attorney, which I wanted to play but at the time, in your early 20s, it's not at the top of your priority list.

And that's the thing. These don't do everything. They do a few things, and they do them brilliantly (now). The Steam Deck did everything, and none of it felt like mine.

This Isn't About the Steam Deck

I'm not here to tell you the Steam Deck is bad. It's not. If you travel for work and you want your whole library in a hotel room, it's probably brilliant.

But for me, it was the wrong kind of tool. It gave me more options, but fewer moments where I was genuinely engaged with what I was doing. It's the same reason I carry dice instead of a phone game. The dice do one thing. You roll them, you play, you're present. The phone gives you a thousand games and you scroll past all of them.

The Steam Deck was a thousand games I scrolled past.

A Game Boy running ten games I chose myself? That's mint, that.

That's Mint That, things I tried, kept, or binned, and why.