Why you should buy a Steam Deck in 2026 (when it's in stock, that is)

The Steam Deck celebrates its fourth birthday this week, an age at which many tech products these days have long become obsolete, succeeded by flashier, more powerful gadgets.

And while those flashier, more powerful gadgets have hit the handheld PC gaming market in the form of the more modern ROG Xbox Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go 2, the Steam Deck's obsolescence is yet to arrive.

In fact, far from becoming obsolete, the Steam Deck remains perhaps the best option on the market, and the one that you should be buying in 2026, if you haven't already.

The Steam Deck is so convenient

It is genuinely difficult to sell quite how convenient the Steam Deck is.

Of course, if you don't have a gaming PC already, then it's easy to see the benefits of having what is effectively a portable PC that you can play Steam games on – though perhaps the Steam Machine will solve that problem, too.

But prior to purchasing my Steam Deck, I had my own gaming PC, along with a PS5 and the already-portable Switch 2 (and formerly a Switch 1), leading me to put off buying the Deck for months, if not years.

Another thing I have, however, is a backlog the size of a small nation, and the Steam Deck has been a game-changer when it comes to knocking out those smaller titles.

On the surface level, it is quite nice being able to just pick this thing up and boot up a game, rather than going through the admittedly not-at-all-hard-but-still-a-little-bit-annoying process of turning my PC on, but the Deck has facilitated far more than that.

I can grab it whenever and wherever, bash out 20 minutes of a game of my choosing and then put it down in the knowledge that when I pick it back up a few hours later, I'll be right back where I left it in a matter of seconds.

I can sit in the front room, being a normal, social human being, spending time with my flatmate watching Ken Burns' The Vietnam War (for some reason), instead of locking myself away in my room.

Whereas previously, reviewing a game (which happens quite a lot, unsurprisingly) would have shackled me to my desk in London, the Deck lets me pop home for the weekend to visit my mum, showing up my comparatively terrible and ungrateful siblings for not doing that.

Just this weekend, I played through the entirety of What Remains of Edith Finch on the train to Liverpool, a game that has sat untouched in my library for years – this thing will make you play those games.

Lossless Scaling is magic

Now, I know we all hate frame generation when studios put it in their games as a means of 'faking' good optimisation, but believe me, it is very cool and chill to do it yourself.

Lossless Scaling is a nifty little tool that you can buy on Steam for £5.89 ($6.99 for my Yankee friends), and it is magic.

The tool gives you control over frame generation, giving you the option to up your frames with the tap of a button, making certain games that would otherwise be borderline unplayable messes on the Steam Deck run like a dream.

It's the FPS equivalent of the 'downloading RAM' meme, except by some miracle, it's real.

Now, it's by no means a perfect solution. If you look closely enough, you can pick out some dodgy visuals, especially when moving the camera around a lot.

But considering you're playing on a much smaller screen than usual and somehow running Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps on a Steam Deck, it's often quite hard to notice and even harder to care.

Lossless Scaling on the Deck has allowed me to play games on the go that just would not have been possible otherwise, which is pretty damn good for something that cost me less than a fiver.

AI has ruined everything

Not content with laying people off, destroying the environment and making us dumber, the insatiable appetite of AI has now come for PC parts.

Between October 2025 and January 2026, RAM prices doubled, mostly thanks to the demand from data centres.

The same is now happening to SSDs, GPUs, CPUs and more. Basically, if it goes in a computer, you're going to be paying a premium for it right now, and it's all thanks to AI.

The shortage of components is so severe, in fact, that Valve themselves are facing issues with the upcoming Steam Machine, and the Steam Deck has briefly gone out of stock in the US.

Whether you want to build yourself a new PC, or simply upgrade your existing one, it is currently the worst time since the pandemic to do so, and it doesn't seem like it's going to be stopping anytime soon.

You would be lucky to get a new PC with even half-decent specs for less than a grand these days, and to be honest, that's being generous.

Under these circumstances, the idea of a fully portable Steam-based PC for less than the price of an RTX 5070 is hard to ignore.

We haven't even covered the customisation options offered by Decky Loader's sea of plugins, or how comfortable the console is to play. This is a device that, the more you use it, truly becomes your own, and something you'll wonder how you ever played without.

If you're like I was, then you probably already want to buy a Steam Deck, and you're just reading articles like this in the hopes that someone will tell you to just go and buy one already. Luckily for you, I am more than happy to fulfil that role. Just go and buy one already.

Whether you're a veteran or just getting into PC gaming for the first time, the Steam Deck is a fantastic bit of kit, and if you haven't got one already, there has never been a better time to grab it.

The Steam Deck is available to purchase directly from Steam.

You can find our full chat about the Steam Deck on the Radio Times Gaming YouTube channel or the Radio Times Gaming Podcast.

Check out more of our Gaming coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.