Frankly this is quite preposterous. It is incredibly valid to discuss any issues people might be having with their product in a subreddit devoted to exactly that device. I can’t imagine more valid discussion points or a better place to talk about it.

The fact that people asking about or reporting an issue troubles some people is a bit alarming. I sincerely hope that people don’t make a Steam Deck so much of their personal identity that they can’t tolerate any critical discussion of the product.

It’s the best kind of correct.

There’s nothing like catching a B&E charge on Thanksgiving!

Won’t be receiving mine until Friday but I have used HDR in Windows extensively. It sounds like the game has activated HDR mode but the display didn’t or vice versa. Can you disable the HDR feature in the QAM on SteamOS or turn off the HDR feature in Crosscode display settings?

Mine went sideways on me two nights ago because I was installing Bioshock 1. I wound up having to hold down the power button for about ten seconds to force it to shut off. (Just because the screen is off doesn’t mean it’s not running.) After that, I was able to single press the power button for I think about three seconds and it came back on.

When you do get yours to come back on, I would set up a SteamOS recovery image and flash that thing back to factory and start over without a card in the slot. Once you get logged in, updated, and make sure it’s working OK, then put the card back in and see about getting that thing mounted and operational. It might not be a bad idea to format it too and start over.

I have a SanDisk Ultra 1TB in my Steam Deck that was shipped and sold from Amazon. No problems whatsoever. It stays nearly full. I think I have 90GB of free space. I don’t think I’ve ever taken it out of the slot except when I took apart the Steam Deck to install a 1TB SSD. I’ve probably purchased a dozen SD and microSD cards for normal prices shipped and sold by Amazon and never had an issue.

With that said, I think I would look for the Black Friday sales from Best Buy and get one from them if you’re worried about it. SanDisk certainly isn’t a particular problem with the Steam Deck. Samsung makes the best ones IMO but only up to 512GB. I’ve heard good things about the Amazon Basics 1TB A1 and A2 cards in a Steam Deck. Lots of people have a SanDisk Extreme or SanDisk Ultra without issues.

512GB OLED complete at 10:13 AM PST. I restarted a couple of times. I removed it from my cart and added it back twice because I thought something was broken on my end. Once I realized the servers were on fire I just kept hammering on buttons and F5 until it went through.

OK. For OP, I think the learning from this event is that on the next Steam Deck release, we need a sticky with some general advice about how to buy something on overloaded servers. A lot of people here took error messages at face value, gave up, and wandered away angry and disappointed.

There’s a number of strategies to make it through to the end and I think we forgot to talk about that in time.

I managed the $549 model. Lots of F5, clicking continue, clicking purchase, clicking I agree… F5, Continue… Agree… Oh crap… Oh no…

It worked!

(I may have purchased 10. I’m not sure.)

Can confirm. I have had OLED displays on my PC for years and my Steam library is something like 600 to 700 games. Exactly four of them have an HDR badge now. I haven’t counted but I have at least 20 games with real, proper HDR support. I have more than that who claim to have HDR but it’s pretty broken.

In summary: games with proper HDR support don’t have a badge. Of the four games with the actual HDR badge, the latest Doom game is the only one I have even played. Elden Ring, for instance doesn’t have an HDR badge.

The LCD can literally only cover 70% of the very basic sRGB color gamut. The saturation slider in SteamOS 3.5 does not “correct” this problem. The OLED screen is not better because the saturation slider is cranked up. It’s better because it covers 100% of sRGB, 97% of DCI-P3, is capable of 600 nits in SDR, and 1000 nits in HDR. It has per pixel dimming allowing it to have infinite contrast. OLED pixels transition between colors effectively instantaneously for the purposes of a gaming discussion.

These two things are simply incomparable regardless of the version of SteamOS running. The LCD appears pale to the eye without the Decky Loader plugin because it cannot generate the necessary colors. Cranking up the saturation makes the colors it can generate appear more vibrant but wildly inaccurate.

I think that’s a bad take. It changes NOTHING. All it does is shift the upset buyers slightly further back in time.

If Lenovo hadn’t developed the Legion Go, Valve probably would have announced the update earlier. Valve’s primary interest was to kick start a console adjacent PC market segment. This increases revenue while serving customers. Having multiple manufacturers in the space is nothing but good for them. It is completely unnecessary to rain on Lenovo’s launch activity and Valve chose not to do so.