Can the Steam Deck be used as a controller?

[Greywander]

I think this is the future of gaming. Although, I imagined it as a joycon-like attachment for your phone, converting your phone into a gamepad with a built-in touchscreen.

It worked amazingly well for the Nintendo DS. I think the Wii U could have worked; the concept was good but the execution was what brought it down. I'd like to use my Switch (not just the joycons, but the entire handheld unit) as a controller, benefiting from the extra screen with touch input.

Hopefully in the future we'll see games allow you to display specific things on secondary screens. If you have a second monitor, it might show a map. Using something like the Deck as a controller, the touchscreen might show an inventory where you can equip or use items just by tapping on them. I'm actually surprised we don't see support for this right now, as it's not uncommon for someone to have multiple monitors, and almost everyone has a phone.

Even without all of that, the Deck should have everything needed hardware-wise to be used as a controller. There's probably a way to use the touchscreen as well, though this may vary from game to game or rely on very specialized software.

[Omega]

It will be a bit of work, but using it's default operating system this can be somewhat easily done.

[Air]

With Steam In-home Streaming, I guess it practically could. Games supporting multiple screens like that is another story, however.

Автор сообщения: Greywander

Hopefully in the future we'll see games allow you to display specific things on secondary screens. If you have a second monitor, it might show a map. Using something like the Deck as a controller, the touchscreen might show an inventory where you can equip or use items just by tapping on them. I'm actually surprised we don't see support for this right now, as it's not uncommon for someone to have multiple monitors, and almost everyone has a phone.

And on the smart phones side of things, I've seen this implementation before, most notably Fallout 4 has a companion app that has all the functions of the Pip Boy(inventory, map, status, quests).

[Sh1nRa358]

slightly faster than gpd win 3 but not by alot. It even has 5 more features that no other handheld has BUT...... you cant replace the ssd! This alone makes it useless and purely a streaming device. Ive seen 1 steam game that was 150gb..... Gabe failed to realize that the switch has special compression for its games while pc games are alot of gb. Ill stick with the gpd win 3 for now.

[Omega]

Автор сообщения: Sh1nRa358

slightly faster than gpd win 3 but not by alot. It even has 5 more features that no other handheld has BUT...... you cant replace the ssd! This alone makes it useless and purely a streaming device. Ive seen 1 steam game that was 150gb..... Gabe failed to realize that the switch has special compression for its games while pc games are alot of gb. Ill stick with the gpd win 3 for now.

It is significantly faster then the GDP Win.

The 100GB Steam games are the ones which will likely not run too wel on this decide anyway. This device is intended for light gaming. And you can also just not install a 150GB game and use this space to install 75 2GB or less games.

"Special compression" .. you are clearly not very technically minded. Switches games are made within the limitation of the switch. Games already make heavy use of compression for video, audio and graphics. SteamOS is perfectly capable of using a filesystem such as Btrfs or F2FS with compression enabled to automatically compress anything which sees a sizable size reduction from compression. Because games are often already compressed they tend to not compress well.

[_I_]

deck can use remote play, which can control a game playing at the host, but not control the host outside of games added to steam on the host

[WhiteKnight]

Like Wii U GamePad. That would be cool.

[KreeDrad]

So I did some idea digging and testing. I was playing Gundam Evolution through the steam deck. For those with bad wifi or just don't like using the wireless connections, if connect both the deck and your pc through ethernet you can use the steam deck as a controller with remote play without any delay, from like the 5 minutes I tested it out. It wasn't delayed from inputting on the deck to looking at my pc monitor.

[AmaiAmai]

Автор сообщения: Greywander

I think this is the future of gaming. Although, I imagined it as a joycon-like attachment for your phone, converting your phone into a gamepad with a built-in touchscreen.

That already exists...any phone can be used to stream games with various devices. AMD Link works great, officially supported by AMD. Nvidia can do the same with a 3rd party app and of course more "complicated" setup.

Example of One : https://www.razer.com/mobile-controllers/razer-kishi-v2-for-android
Example of Another: Gamesir X2

Just Google "Telescopic Controllers for Phone" and many will appear. Bluetooth ones exist, and Joycons themselves should be supported in any recent phone running Android.

Example of someone using JoyCon on Android: https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming/comments/uvkhmw/how_to_use_joycons_on_android/


Either way, such a thing is already available today, and if that is what you wanted, then I would go the phone route over the Steam Deck since it will be smaller, lighter, easier to replace controller if it gets wrekt while gaming, and more importantly, it's a phone -- and rooted ones are very, very, useful.

Many phones and android tablets can also host Wi-Fi directly, cutting out any lag or other BS issues people claim to have. Even my cheap ONN tablet can stream games well with no lag when I connect the computer to it's "hotspot" that is then connected to the wireless router.

Other devices like the Kindles might need to be rooted...

---

I recommend the phone route since you can do the same thing with a phone and controller type that was listed, if all you want to do is STREAM games from a PC or service. If you want to play them on native hardware, the Steam Deck is better for that.

For emulation purposes, it depends on the phone. Some of these phones have GPUs that aren't too far from the power of a laptop's iGPU or even stronger. With the lower overhead of Android (esp. when rooted or from a phone manufactuer that cuts the junk), you can do a lot with 6-8GB of RAM.

[_I_]

streaming controls are kinda messed up at this time with the new bpm

check its mappings for the game

[Electric Cupcake]

Certainly.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/how-to-get-multi-screen-3ds-wii-u-emulation-on-steam-deck/

Valve actually got into a bit of trouble for showing the Steam Deck running Yuzu in a promo video a while back. /saidthequietpartoutlound