I thought I was ready for the Steam Deck. New USB-C hub? Check. New 512GB microSD card? Check. A new collection in my Steam library dedicated to benchmarking? Check! But ladies and gentlemen, my level of preparedness is laughable compared to Redditor LightyKD. This resourceful (and very patient) individual clearly misses the glory days of physical media, because they have an entire box of SD cards ready for launch. Hey, the Steam Deck is a handheld console, right?
What you’re looking at in the photo is, technically, a physical PC game collection. 40+ titles, each one loaded up on a microSD card. Then it’s slapped inside an SD adapter, with official box art printed and affixed to each one.
And because as PC gamers, our backlogs never stop expanding, they’ve got some additional cards of various capacities waiting in the wings.
“Some of us are just old and enjoy physical media.”
In the age of on-demand digital downloads and automatic updates, it’s not surprising to see some naysayers in the Reddit comments.
One Redditor replied: “I don’t mean to hate but I’ve seen multiple posts from people planning on doing this and I just don’t understand what the point of this is, to take all this time and effort to go out of your way to inconvenience yourself by shoehorning a digital distribution system back into a physical cartridge format.”
LightyKD’s reply lit a little flame inside the part of my heart reserved for gaming nostalgia:
“Some of us are just old and enjoy physical media.”
More power to you, LightyKD. Enjoy games the way you want to enjoy them!
But will this dedicated (and endearing) approach actually work on the Steam Deck? Can you preload a game to a microSD on a different PC, by first selecting it as an additional library source in Steam, and then simply insert it into your Deck and launch it? Assuming the card is formatted as ext4, that seems perfectly reasonable. However, it remains to be seen if this method will actually work with SteamOS.
That’s just one of many questions we should have an answer to when the Steam Deck embargo lifts on February 25.
If you can’t get enough Steam Deck content, check out my dedicated category for Valve’s handheld console. And stay tuned for Episode 3 of Games For Everyone!
