The Steam Deck’s battery life isn’t one of its best qualities. While this weakness is outweighed by the pleasures of playing PC games in bed or on the bus, most such games will drain the Deck quickly, requiring a degree of foresight if you want to entertain yourself on a long trip away from mains power. At the same time, different games will drain at different speeds, with some allowing Valve’s handheld to last hours longer than others.
Ultimately, I think the only truly accurate way to measure and judge the Steam Deck’s battery life is to test a bunch of different games to see how long it lasts with each. So I have! Here you’ll find a list of games with how long they took to empty the Deck’s battery from full. I’ll be coming back and adding more to the list as I test them, so you can see for yourself what uptimes to expect from your favourites.