I would disagree here. Elite Dangerous is a very UI and text menu heavy game. I fully expected to pop it open and nope out with it being unusable and not optimized for the steam deck experience.

300 hours of gameplay with the only frustration being I have to hit "Steam + X" to manually pop open the text editor from time to time says its possible to even play some decade old games.

I occasionally play elite on my phone (with GeForce now) with no problems.

I guess you could try running your games at 800p on your current system and see what it's like. I actually do a lot of gaming at 1280x800 on an old Macbook. I'm using Parsec to connect to an Optiplex with a 1050ti in the basement.

Timberborn is a favorite of mine and even with tons going on it's a good experience at 800p. I think the Steamdeck is right around 1050/1050ti performance too and that's better than you'd think at 800p. I'm currently playing Doom 2016 at Ultra and the card can pump 110FPS+ (though I'm limited to 60 on the laptop).

The closeness of a handheld device makes up for screen size. Try holding up your phone and comparing it with your main Television. It's a lot closer than the raw dimensions would suggest.

1. It's possible to dock the Steam Deck and use a mouse and keyboard. The specs make a strong case for itself as a gaming PC at it's price point.

2. While not every game is suitable for the Steam Deck, almost every game that was designed to run well on a gaming console will control well on the steam deck, if it's compatible on a software level.

A lot (most?) games work but will have Deck caveats labeled (on the Steam store product page in the right column there is a "Steam Deck Compatibility" area with details.

Also, the input mapping is fantastic. It's a little cumbersome but the touchpads work for mouse input and the additional L/R 4 and 5 buttons on the back help.

It's possible for this to be an issue. I've been lucky that so far everything I've wanted has been legible, or even better configurable for different resolutions or scaling factors. In some cases I have found the touch screen to be useful over trying to hit tiny UI widgets.

Honestly, every game that's not certified that I've tried to play, I have been able to craft a control system that feels very nice. The sheer number of buttons helps.

Steam has Steam Deck ratings for games that evaluates that. In general, games that a are fully verified have good fonts even on 7" screen [1].

The games that don't, will show yellow "Playable" rating with a notice that fonts might be small and will need magnification. [2]

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

[2]: https://i.redd.it/y7iramksmij81.jpg

Some games are difficult. Depending on the ui elements though, you could work around them. If the problem is small text, there is little you can do, but with steam controls you can create custom uis for input, which makes some unplayable games very playable.

TV scale large UI elements and tiny screen large UI elements are actually pretty similar. If your game supports being played on a tv at couch difference it probably will work on a small screen as well. Most games support TV scale UIs so it's not a problem.

99% of the time it's not a problem. When it is a problem you can bind a screen magnifier to a key. I still wouldn't want to play some games on it, games that require extensive typing (duskers is a game about piloting drones through a command line, wouldn't want to play that without a bluetooth keyboard), but for the most part it's fine. Most games, even text heavy ones, have big old fonts and large UI elements.