It may even be useful for accessibility reasons. Those who have many many different screens with greenscreen effects, those that can't yet afford the higher end voice changers, or who, during their streams, don't have their keyboards easily accessible like artists or dancers. There are certainly streamers who can use Stream Decks well, and they would be considered an essential part of their kit, I'm not going to deny that. But if you're just starting on your streaming career, the Stream Deck is probably the last bit of kit you need and far higher on your list than it needs to be. Now I'm not saying the Stream Deck is useless. You can make the Stream Deck buttons bring up digital elements on screen, like reminders to follow, but timed alerts would be less hassle wouldn't they? Or you can get it to tweet you're live, but if it's the same tweet every time it's less likely to get engagement so you better hand craft it anyway. Same goes for those quick screen changes.
And if anything comes up that needs muting on screen, well pause that video or pause the game or quickly tabbing out to your software is preferable. (Image credit: Elgato) The big red buttonĮmergency mutes? Quick screen changes? The former is often actually solved by microphones themselves, in fact Elgato's Wave microphones have physical mute buttons. At the push of a button you can open a saved tab-but if it's so important for you to have on a Stream Deck, you've probably got it bookmarked already right? But when you're waiting for Photoshop or other applications to open, just pressing them on your taskbar seems like no biggie.
Stream Decks can also open software really quickly at the press of a button. Spending that cash on a second monitor is a better addition to a set up than a Stream Deckfor looking at chat, stream alerts, levels, and generally all the other benefits of having double the screens. So what else can these things do? Perhaps Stream Decks are useful for those without a second monitor to tab out to which shows their stream software? That would be a great argument, except you can get a low-end monitor these days for around £100, and the Stream Deck is £140. And now it sits dormant, waiting for its next time to shine. It was a solid addition to my setup until it felt like an effort to remove my hand from my mouse or keyboard and lean forward to press it instead of just tabbing out and quickly changing whatever I needed to do. And that's what I did for the first three months of owning a Steam Deck. Ingenious! A perfect invention to help me smoothly go from one screen to another for the arduous five times I did every stream. And I fell for it! I change scenes, so I need a physical object to help me do that rather than just pressing a button on my other screen.
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