I’ve been a proponent of a gaming laptop for some time now. Sure it helped that the pandemic “broke” the video card market, and the niche custom PC build market has pivoted back to the mid-90s chaos of compatibility. Plus, I don’t have the time/patience to build a liquid cooled rig. You can get an amazing laptop rig, delivered to your door within a week, for nearly the same price as a custom rig – heck, during the pandemic it was the same cost as a video card. The screen of a gaming laptop can be a bit harder to figure out… but it’s not really different than a custom rig.

What does this have to do with anything? The Steam Deck uses it’s native streaming mode to play games that are installed on your PC over the Switch on any home network. I’ve used this on various streaming devices, and it works “ok”. The best experience so far was from a “normal” laptop to my gaming laptop, with expected video degradation. The Steam Deck’s streaming option makes all of that go away.

I can certainly install a game like Fallen Order or Control on the Deck, and they play quite well. A drain on the battery of course, so the sessions are a bit harder to manage if I’m not docked on 45w. But streaming… that is another thing. The gaming laptop has no performance or power issues, and it plays almost identical to the native Deck mode. I’ve yet to give it a shot at Deck + Stream + Dock mind you, which would certainly put it through some crazy paces. It would effectively fully replace a console at that point (which is a separate topic about the future of XBOX).

The natural downside to all this is that “gaming on the go” isn’t really an option if you’re streaming. However, you can run it in dual mode, with a local install and the option to stream is always present. I tried this with No Man’s Sky and it worked flawlessly.

I realize this is part of a series of glowing recommendations for the Deck, and yeah, that’s right on target. The lack of integrated mouse + keyboard controls makes some games more complicated than others (e.g. you can’t really play any RTS or ARPG without a dock), but the rest of the features make it feel like a massive step forward in gaming.