Thoughts on the official Steam Deck Docking Station

After having and playing with the official Steam Deck Docking Station, here's some thoughts on the experience. Note: personal purchase.

Released earlier in October, along with the Steam Deck itself no longer having a reservation queue, I was very keen to see what Valve would give us officially. Especially since JSAUX and ivoler already provide great docked experiences for a lower price (since they don't give you a charger too).

For the basic design it's perfectly fine. All the ports are on the back out of the way, so you only see the short lip at the front when you've docked your Steam Deck. No ethernet wire poking out the side like with JSAUX (although ivoler don't have this issue). There's no problems with the design or build quality at all, except for those of you keeping thicker protective cases on where it won't fit in. It also has a nice non-slip cover on the bottom so it won't move around.

A reminder on what it has available: 3 x USB-A 3.1 Gen1 Ports, Gigabit Ethernet, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, USB-C Power Delivery pass-through input and an included charger.

When you first get it, you'll likely need a firmware update before you really use it. A big benefit of it, is that Valve provide firmware updates directly, so there's no messing with anything external. You either get a pop-up telling you one is available, or you can go into the settings and check for updates to have it appear. It probably won't be updated often but it's still a nice touch.

So it looks nice and it can get easy updates — how is the overall experience? Well, that's where things aren't so good in this case. I've now used 4 or 5 different JSAUX docks (I've lost count) and one from ivoler, I use my Steam Deck docked all the time and have done since before the original release (since I was an original Steam Deck reviewer) via two different USB-C Hubs, so I think I have a fair amount of experience here.

The problem is that the official Steam Deck Docking Station has its quirks with actually connecting to external displays, tested by connecting to multiple TVs and PC Monitors all from different vendors. Sometimes, it works right away. Most of the time though, I have to do a little dance between powering the Steam Deck down and on again, turning screens on and off and so on. Unfortunately, for me, the official Docking Station is very much not a plug and play experience. Sadly, I am apparently in a long list of people having issues with it. Looking on the Steam Forum, there's a great many posts of people seeing the same or just not seeing a signal on their external screen at all. A few in our Discord have also reported such issues too.

At 4K, the Steam Deck UI acts a bit weirdly too. Things don't always match up on the screen and the UI doesn't perform well. Thankfully, Valve added external screens settings so I can put it into 1080p and it works fine while still looking good overall. Not a big issue but one I hope they sort too.

Since Valve has put a lot of work into the docked experience, overall once it's actually setup correctly it works quite nicely. I have no big main complaints about the main docked experience right now. Bluetooth controllers both PS4 and Xbox work just fine, as do controllers plugged in via USB. Honestly, playing with the Steam Deck while docked is a really fun experience and really continues to show how versatile the Steam Deck is as a gaming device. However, I really do hope Valve add an easy way to deal with external drives as more people wish to use them to expand their storage even more. It's possible to do, like with the JSAUX M.2 SSD Dock, but the setup is annoying to do. They have the functionality there for SD Cards, so it's not a stretch to say they could expand that for other external drives too.

If Valve manage to sort out the issues with it connecting properly to external screens, which is the main function, it might turn around into a recommendation. For now though, I would suggest going with JSAUX or ivoler instead and if you already have a spare charger, you'll be saving money too.

You can buy it on Steam.