| HoloDust said: To be honest, I'm not sure what the target audience for Deck is. It looks too weak to run current AAA games even at lowest settings, which kinda makes it handheld for less demanding and retro games. |
Well the purpose of it is to make the barrier to entry for PC gaming lower. You try to say go to bestbuy or newegg or anywhere else and search for new portable PCs for $399 or even $529 that have 16GB of ram, you will not find any. Not even chrome books which are supposed to be the cheapest of the bunch will give you that. Even prebuilt Desktops won't give you that if you are trying to buy new. Not to mention the CPU/GPU specs that the Steam Deck comes with.
So imo, it's target audience is a) Gamers on a budget and b) Those that want to play PC games on the go
Now as for it's gaming capabilities, currently it can play Jedi the fallen order at high settings according to IGN and we have seen it play other games as well. Now will it be able to play every game that comes out at mid to high settings? Probably not. And I am sure as time goes on, there will be some games that will down right not work on it without adding some mods to tweak the graphics to make it compatible. But that's the price you pay for $399/$529 price point. That doesn't mean the Steam Deck will be useless however. There will still be a wide selection of games that will work on it even by the end of the generation. And if you follow someone like Low Spec Gamer, he shows you plenty of ways to make even the most demanding games run reasonably on even Intel iGPUs.
And yes, if this is a success, Steam deck will get iterations every few years to upgrade it's internals like other PCs do. Realistically, if you want the best longevity, you should wait for the second iteration assuming it's a success. I pre-ordered this one however because for the types of games that I am going to be playing on it, it's perfect. And I do have my 5950x + 3080 for the games that require a bit more power.
Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 19 July 2021 
PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850
