I have a Steam Deck, and while it's playable, I'm not going to be setting any speed records with it. It's really kind of painfully difficult to things that I have down to muscle memory on a keyboard. Just as an example, copying recipes from one assembler to 20 more takes me 1-2s on keyboard. On the Deck the default controller layout doesn't even allow for doing it once. Early game tricks like holding z and using your mouse to drop individual pieces of coal across all of your miners and smelters in a row isn't a thing as far as I can work out. In fact I essentially had to fully load all my smelters rather than distribute it because I couldn't figure out how to split stacks.

I'm sure a lot of this is familiarity, and if I force myself I will get more efficient with the Steam Deck, but I doubt I'd ever find it superior or even equivalent to keyboard and mouse.

Here's hoping they'll backport some of the Switch controls to the Steam Deck

I have >400 hours logged in Factorio, and almost all of that is on my laptop with an external Steam Controller. I think it works great, and play that way even when I'm home with access to keyboard and mouse.

The touch controls on the Steam Controller are excellent though, so I'm not sure how good it will be on the Switch which uses joysticks...

> The touch controls on the Steam Controller are excellent though, so I'm not sure how good it will be on the Switch which uses joysticks...

Whilst lots of games ignore it, the Switch screen is a touchscreen.

You kinda have to ignore it if you want your game to be playable docked.

I happen to be one of those switch users who almost exclusively use it docked. Initially I thought the concept was great, but the screen is just too small for my eyes on all the strategy games I play, I always defer to my iPad on holidays.

I actually purchased multiple docks, the nice thing about the switch to me is being able to quickly move it to another room as needs arise.

Plenty of games have multiple sets of controls. A handful of Switch games make use of both, to great effect. Like Cozy Grove. You don't have to completely ignore it, to allow for one playing style.

Yeah... I hope the Nintendo Switch port is brought to Steam Deck too. I gave Factorio a quick go a few days ago and it was painful to play (at least with the default key config)

The blog post says they will focus on making controller play better on Switch, then make that generic for PC(which implies Steam Deck as well). The PC/Steam Deck version supports mods, which is better than Switch anyway.

Do you happen to know what the status of the Steam Deck ecosystem is? I would be in the market to get a more powerful version of the Switch, which the Steam Deck would be, but it seems to be discontinued.

The Steam Deck is not discontinued. It's actually quite new, with the first shipments going out to normal customers at the beginning of this year, and more and more going out now. I got mine in June. Valve made a reservation process that required an old enough Steam account and $5 refundable reservation to avoid scalpers.

Regarding the ecosystem, the Steam Deck is a x86 PC. It comes with SteamOS, which is an open Arch Linux based distribution. You are free to install other operating systems like Windows on it. The out of the box Steam experience is quite good, with lots of games on the Verified list[0], and they play really well. People also install non-Steam games and software, including console emulators, and there are growing communities around that.

[0]https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified

Found the time traveler.

Steam deck can be a bit of work doing things like getting epic games to run, file transfers, and setting up the controls for games that aren't fully supported. Many games work flawlessly like they're on switch, though. It depends on whether occasional issues that force you to tinker are fun or not.

Elden Ring plays well. I don't plan on using my switch OLED until the next Zelda comes out.

I bet touch adds a dimension to it. Touch-and-drag for belts, picking from inventory with touch...

Sounds like a hassle. Good controller support would beat touch controller in both ergonomics and speed every day.

I hope the Controller support been improved with this launch as I tried to play Factorio on my Steam Deck before but felt like it was just "emulated mouse" support basically which isn't nearly nice enough. I feel like Tropico-series did a good implementation of top-down+strategy controller for their games.

Unfortunately the steam deck touch calibration is kind of bad. Mine is all over the place at times, and on kb/mouse designs it can be hard to be accurate enough.

A fair amount of Switch games don’t use touch.

Honestly I forget it's even there. For the most part, only mobile games ported to the Switch use it.

And many first party games, of course. It's not a great experience, though - on the OG switch, at least, the screen is really low quality.

I feel like a lot of games optimize their UI for TVs, but at that size scaled down the touch targets would be too small to not fat-finger.

Switch games can actually target handheld mode vs. tv mode and give you a better experience to solve that problem. Few of them do, unfortunately, IME.

Switch games need to have non-touch control options cause it's also meant to be played docked

One game that I didn't think would work well on a controller was Rimworld but it's actually really great, and I love playing Rimworld from the couch. Hopefully the same amount of care for controller controls goes into Factorio.

Hopefully it'll support touch too... touch to drag out paths and move inventory things around is a wonderful experience in many games, and I'm always sad to see most Switch games not even support tapping on-screen buttons.