I’m not giving up my Steam Deck for MSI’s new Claw

This is not a review of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus, the first gaming handheld available with Intel’s new Arc G3 Extreme handheld gaming chip. Now that my colleague Sean Hollister is done reviewing the Steam Machine, I’ll let him go deep on the new Claw at some point in the future. This article, instead, is my first impressions of the new MSI Claw as someone who primarily plays games on a Steam Deck OLED. Sean called the Claw the “next-gen handheld,” and I wanted to find out: Would it be a worthwhile upgrade for Deck fans like me? Could it possibly be worth the eye-watering $1,799 price? For me, the Claw has a high bar to clear. The $789 Steam Deck OLED is my favorite handheld — maybe my favorite gadget — since the original Nintendo Switch. It’s comfortable to hold, has a great-looking display, and has a good enough battery to survive pretty much any evening of gaming for me. It lets me play the vast majority of my Steam library wherever I want. But the Deck isn’t great for every game I own; top-of-the-line AAA games occasionally play poorly, with muddy graphics, bad frame rates, or both. I will suffer through those drawbacks for many games, but every once in a while, I turn to my PS5 for titles that don’t work well on the Deck. …