How to Get the Best Battery Life Out of Your Steam Deck

Valve’s Steam Deck offers a rocky start to a promising future. While there’s nothing quite like having access to (most of) your gaming PC’s library in a Switch-like handheld, it’s also got a number of issues that hold it back. Chief among them? Battery life. Fortunately, there are ways to get more playtime on a single charge. In some cases, substantially more.

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Before we get into tips on optimizing battery life, it’s worth addressing why it’s so necessary in the first place. According to Valve’s official estimates, the Steam Deck gets an unusually wide range of between two to eight hours of game time. However, some users (including myself) have found that in some situations they get even less than that, with the device dying after less than 90 minutes.

There are a lot of complicated factors that contribute to this. The Steam Deck has a fairly beefy 5,313-mAh battery (for comparison, the Nintendo Switch has a 4,210-mAh cell), but that capacity is working against a library of games that simply weren’t designed or optimized for a portable handheld. Many games on Steam–especially big AAA titles like Death Stranding or Doom Eternal–were initially designed primarily with consoles and/or gaming desktops in mind, which run on power directly from an outlet.

Compare this to games designed for the Switch, where all developers know going in that their games will at least sometimes be played on a handheld with a limited battery. Even for existing games like Skyrim, developers put a lot of effort into optimizing them to run well on the Switch without being too much of a battery drain. While some games have been similarly optimized for the Steam Deck, most haven't yet.

Complicating things further is the fact that not all games use the same amount of power. Modern, complex games like God of War can burn through battery trying to render their worlds even on moderate graphics settings, while some games with simpler graphics and engines can last for several hours. All of this brings us to our first tip:

Since some games are a bigger drain than others, it’s important to consider when you’re concerned about battery life. That doesn’t mean you can't ever play Horizon Zero Dawn if you want, but Stardew Valley might be the better option if you’re going to be on a plane ride or road trip.

There are no hard, fast rules for what kinds of games will get better battery life, but more modern games, games with a lot of complex graphical detail to render, and games that require a really high frame rate will drain the battery faster. So all other things equal, if you’re in a battery pinch, lean toward your indie favorites.