I am a shameless Steam Deck enthusiast. I pre-ordered mine the minute after I first read the announcement and I’ve honestly enjoyed my playing games on the Deck ever since mine arrived. It’s a solid piece of hardware that lets me play some of my favorite formerly-PC games away from my office desk.
But in the past two-ish years with the Steam Deck, one major issue has always bugged me about the game console: why is it so tedious to browse through the Steam Store?
The Steam Store is packed with games on sale and inexpensive games that deliver experiences that the Steam Deck could easily handle (i.e., cheap indie games with simple graphics). The Steam Deck should be an impulse buyer’s Infinity Gauntlet. All the pieces for quick and easy sub-five-dollar purchases are right there. But when I turn the Steam Deck on and load the store and it’s just a clunky mess of poorly designed navigation controls, frustrating page refreshes that reset my browsing progress, and the inability to easily sort through the Steam Store the way I’d be able to on the PC.
I understand that not every game on Steam will run well, or at all, on the Steam Deck. The existing verification system is more than enough to indicate to responsible buyers what kind of Steam Deck compatibility they can expect from the game they’re looking at in the Steam Store. So having two different Steam Store fronts displayed in the Steam Deck feels like overkill. Especially when you realize that the Steam Deck-friendly store front is a very watered down version of the normal Steam Store front. The organizational options and sale visibility is almost entirely wiped away in the Steam Deck-friendly store front.
Unfortunately the Deck-friendly store is far easier an experience to browse through than the all-inclusive store front.
I’d love to use the Deck to browse through sales for games to snag and later play on my PC. It’s almost like Valve didn’t think that people would want to use the Deck as a store browser. But sometimes I just want to spend a few minutes in bed poking through new releases, before I fall asleep. While it is possible to do so on the Deck, it’s very cumbersome and the user-interface has the tendency to completely reset when you back out of a game’s store page to return to the main store page to continue browsing.
It’s just a mess.
I’ve held out hope that over the years as more updates pass through the Steam Deck’s update pipeline, we’d get a better Steam Store interface for the Deck, but month after month I find myself slogging through the existing user interface, frustrated that they continue to make it difficult for me to give them my money.
