20 ms·

More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

635 points by ekianjo 3y ago

dolmen 3y ago
Cool misleading stat. Games not tested are out of the 100%. This is NOT 75% of Steam catalog.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  "Games Tested" != "All Games"
lom 3y ago
Why has the ratio of verified dropped?
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Because the ratio of verified was too optimistic in the beginning - and potentially the current ratio is closer to the reality, with a minority of games released on PC actually made to work well on a smaller screen. Note that requiring a launcher, or keyboard input also make the games land in playable territory even though it works perfectly otherwise.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
  They probably have put the most effort into making popular games work, but as time as gone one, they've tried to “verify” more and more less popular games. I'm assuming here that there is a missing “not previously reviewed” segment in the graph, i.e. there are less games at the start than at the end.
- blamazon 3y ago
  There's a finite amount of validation effort available and presumably in the early days there was a focus on highlighting the games that best demonstrated the Deck's selling points. It stands to reason that as time goes by and the low hanging fruit has been picked, validation effort instead goes into more and more obscure or less obviously Deck friendly games.
- Zekio 3y ago
  considering the amount of new games each day on steam, it doesn't surprise me
- izacus 3y ago
  The long tail of Steam (PC) games aren't really made for small screens and controllers. For a game to be "verified", it needs to fully support controllers, have readable text on a 8" 1280x800 screen and run well on Deck's hardware using Proton. As more older Steam games went through the process, less % of games actually fulfill those conditions (main reason I'm personally seeing is either "small text" or a launcher that requires use of mouse to click "Play" before the game starts).
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    Even witcher 3 that's verified have small text. Not too bad but I prefer it to be slightly larger.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      It seems like a lot of games that would be green/verified are classed as yellow/playable solely because of small text, which is equivalent to being verified if you use your docked Steam Deck as a cheap gaming PC first and a handheld second.
      - fendy3002 3y ago
        Yeah but the situation isn't limited to deck, though deck makes it worse since the screen is smaller than average monitor. Modern games without a big ass high res monitor will have text that's too small to be enjoyable.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    I believe too they don't even waste time verifying indie games that have too few sales. My game was written for the Steam Deck but I don't hope to ever get my title "verified". I inly sold maybe 200 copies, ha ha.
    - MiddleEndian 3y ago
      What is the dev experience like? Did you do your development on the Steam Deck itself?
- esjeon 3y ago
  My theories: (1) Steam got a lot of new games. (2) Compatibility issues found deep inside games. (3) No compat issues, but issues with Steam Deck specifically.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  1. Hardware requirements increase with time while the platform being verified against remains the same. They may run... just not well due to hardware limitations 2. Varies depending on how many games implement incompatible things like certain anti-cheats. Admittedly, this may only account for a small amount. They come/go in waves -- eg: looter/shooter trend 3. Steam Deck verified is a more strict qualification than Linux in general; tiny screen/resolution, gamepads, etc. 4. Finally, inconsistency between the rate-of-verification and rate-of-addition - these are not locked Probably more, these are what immediately come to mind
barney54 3y ago
For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it? And how do you use it? I would like to talk myself into buying one, but I can’t think of a decent use case.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I love my deck. It's my preferred way to play games these days. For better or for worse, it's also been the reason I've spent more time playing games this year than the years before. The console like quality gives it a different feel compared to a controller hooked up to a gaming PC in my opinion. The fast sleep/resume also makes it super easy to pick up and play for a short while without having to worry about not making it to the next save point in time. SteamOS/HoloISO is so good that I seriously consider installing it on my next gaming computer when the time to upgrade eventually comes. It has tons of issues with Nvidia hardware (as with any kind of Linux distro) but other than that it's one of the first times I've seen Linux for the mainstream done right. Read only system images, all software installed in the user directory makes for a very stable hassle free update experience. You can unlock the system partition if you want, but I intend to keep it read only for as long as I can. It's not some kind of magical machine that will make you experience fun, though. If you're already happy with the amount of game time you're getting and you don't think you'll use it, don't get one. It is what it is, a handheld console. I bought mine knowing I'd probably spend a significant amount of time on it playing games in bed and on the go, and that's where it has really shined for me, especially when I was too sick to sleep for a few days. If you've already got a gaming PC or console and a tablet/large smartphone, consider getting a comfortable controller grip for that instead and stream the games over your network. I've got pretty good experiences streaming games over WiFi and even over the internet this way. It's fiddly to set up, but it'll work for significantly less money than a separate game console. If you've got money to throw at your gaming hobby, also consider more powerful alternatives. I think the 1200x800 screen is fine for the Deck screen size, but some people don't like it. The machine is also clearly optimized to play games at that resolution, hooking it up to a monitor can quickly show the limitations of a 15W chip. There are more powerful gaming handhelds out there, often running Windows and some kind of homebrew console environment, for a significantly higher price. If you know anyone with a Deck, ask them to try it out for a few minutes.
- 3y ago
m00dy 3y ago
oh finally, we see linux gaming rising.
- esjeon 3y ago
  ... but is this the year of linux desktop...?
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    nobody cares about the year of the Linux desktop anymore. Linux is already everywhere.
    - Ygg2 3y ago
      Linux is only on servers/routers. And locked in Android's attic, in a padded cell.
  - Ygg2 3y ago
    Year of Serenity OS I gave up on Linux desktop long time ago.
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    Don't know about desktop [1], but it could be the year of the Linux handheld. [1] my personal YotLD was '99.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >the year of the Linux handheld. Android achieved that many years ago.
      - Synaesthesia 3y ago
        Android is based on Linux but it's still not open source, got a lot of closed source stuff on top of it. I wouldn't exactly call it "Linux" which generally means GNU/Linux
lohit244 3y ago
Still waiting to get wider availability in other countries. Probably should just wait till Steam Deck 2 at this point
- ekianjo 3y ago
  You can probably ask someone on HN to send it over to you.
- taink 3y ago
  I think they were planning to support the first generation fairly long-term, so you probably don't want to wait for a Steam Deck 2. I think I've seen people that can't get their hands on it through "official" means get their own by arranging a delivery through someone else on Reddit for instance. I don't know if you'd be comfortable with that solution though. EDIT: they are planning to support the Steam Deck long-term, but they said nothing about the first generation -- my bad[1]. [1]: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/press/book/steamDeck_booklet_EN.pdf#page=26 https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/pres...
- smileybarry 3y ago
  I cross-shipped mine via a US proxy address. Cost more but I don’t regret it. Also — check local resellers, some importers just set up a deal with Valve but don’t appear on Steam.
cloverich 3y ago
Though I've long since given up on my gaming days, I purchased a Steam deck last month, mostly out of impulse. I'm frankly astonished at the amount of playable games, and also the amount of quality indie games out there. I spent $50 picking on-sale indies and quickly had a backlog. Its been more enjoyable (and surprisingly comfortable) than I expected too. I'm definitely in the very casual crowd at this point, gaming an hour or two a week on the couch, and its hit that sweet spot. Purchased the base model; overall impressed with the quality of the device too. So much more comfortable than I was expecting, I just rest it on my lap. Its great.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  I mostly play managemen/city builder style games like Cities Skylines or Factorio. Have you tried any of those types of games and if so what's been your experience?
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    the trackpads work well with these kind of games. As long as you don't expect to act in urgency - typically building / management games work very well with this device.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    I play a ton of these on Deck. Very satisfied with it. I am also a pause - command - unpause kind of player though. But the trackpads work better than you'd expect, and often have community layouts for the controller than add things that make it even nicer than playing with mouse and keyboard (the rotary menus for city overlays are awesome)
    - klik99 3y ago
      “Better than you expect” but still not ideal. It’s doable, but I just don’t get the same enjoyment out of mouse heavy games. But with cloud save it can be great to dip in when not at the computer
KingOfCoders 3y ago
Has someone sold ther Steam Deck for a ROG Ally? Why? Has it the same compatibility?
- ekianjo 3y ago
  No idea about such stats, but the ROG Ally has several problems: - Windows as the key interface - very poor battery life (even worse than the Deck!) - no trackpads so this limits what you can ever play with it to games made for gamepads - none of the SteamOS goodness
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    Compared with deck, no suspend continue. And I read that the button can stuck and it can get hot.
    - calini 3y ago
      Both consoles get about as hot, but yeah, no good Sleep option in Windows is a shame.
      - kibwen 3y ago
        > Both consoles get about as hot The problem specific to the Ally right now is that it seems to get too hot where the SD card reader is, causing SD cards to fry for some users: https://www.dexerto.com/tech/asus-rog-ally-has-a-bizarre-overheating-issue-2193923/ https://www.dexerto.com/tech/asus-rog-ally-has-a-bizarre-ove... . I'm sure this will be fixed in a future hardware revision, but for now it seems worth waiting on the Ally for them to hammer out the first-generation kinks. Still, I'm happy that the Ally exists, both as competition for Valve and to help prove that this PC form factor has legs.
        calini 3y ago
        Exactly, competition is good!
easyThrowaway 3y ago
The only lingering issue I've found while playing on the steam deck is that a lot of DX8-9 games are somewhat missing a few shaders and lighting effects, I guess due to the way wine approximates them. Usually the dgvoodoo2 dll wrapper is good enough to restore them. It's quite hard to find a game that doesn't work at all, the most common cause usually being an external launcher trying to mess with the system in ways that wine doesn't agree with.
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
Which also means they are running on Linux. This is mind-blowing.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  According to other sources (ProtonDB), about 80% of a much larger subset of Steam games run on Linux (some worse than others) - next milestone is 90% I guess, a couple of years down the road.
  - mjevans 3y ago
    Some of those games 'require' an unofficial version of Steam's Proton which includes support for features in the underlying components that the official version can't ship. Mostly it's an issue for video codecs in games (patents are the issue here), or games that use a less popular API. (From windows! Which has ~3 decades of APIs from multiple vendors. Let alone 10s (10-100 IDK) different ways of playing back audio or a video, or both at the same time.) Some of the changes are simply more bleeding edge patches or game specific tweaks that are included faster than official releases include them.
- kibwen 3y ago
  From a user's perspective they're running on Linux, though from the games' perspective they're running on Windows, thanks to Proton (based on Wine).
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Having written even basic tools in native code for Linux and run into compatibility issues (glibc versions, ugh), I'm not surprised. Wine is probably the best cross-distro Linux platform, especially for closed source products that don't get compiled for every specific repo. Flatpak/AppImage would also work but that lacks the raw system access that many games depend on (even if that system access is secretly emulated by Wine).
  - haunter 3y ago
    See the famous "Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux" article https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
sylware 3y ago
Do you know: titles with a native elf/linux build which does not run in the official steam runtime won't be validated. Some titles are getting c++ ABI/glibc issues because if they build "outside" the steam official steam runtime they will be hit full frontal by c++ and glibc planned obsolescence (they would have to control in a fine grained way the symbols/versions they link their binaries with... feature not provided by the sourceware binutils...).
- mariusor 3y ago
  I mean, Steam/linux32 is the "platform" to release games on for linux. As much as I'd like to compile random game binaries on my own machine with my own glibc that's probably never going to happen.
  - sylware 3y ago
    Some devs do link their elf/linux binaries on arch elf/linux, and then have symbol version issues once running in the steam runtime. They have to link with the steam runtime and not with the arch elf/linux binaries.
Eumenes 3y ago
Is this supposed to challenge the switch? Personally, as a lifelong PC gamer, I've never been able to get into handheld/mobile stuff, or even consoles - its not even the screen size, but the controls and overall experience. I want to be upright in a chair, with a full keyboard + mouse in front of me. I like to use my dual screens to research stuff in downtime or check on settings/optimizations. Is this primarily used on the couch, or in public whilst out and about?
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  You can drop the Steam Deck into a dock (Steam Dock?) and have your desktop monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk-chair.... But at that point what is the point, I guess.
  - nucleardog 3y ago
    As someone that has probably used my deck docked at my desk more than anything… 1. Suspend and resume. If I’ve got a quick 20 minutes I can hit the button, change the input on a monitor, pick up my controller and play. No need to shut a bunch of stuff down to free up RAM, wait for the game to start, wait for a save to load, etc. And no need to worry about getting to a save point, finish a cut scene… just suspend. 2. It doesn’t heat my office up a bazillion degrees like my desktop.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  You can play switch games on the Deck but I wouldn't call it a Switch competitor. The Switch is targeted at family gaming with colorful multiplayer games and inoffensive titles. The Deck is just a handheld console. It's a successor to the PSP more than it's a competitor to anything else. The fact it's implemented as a laptop with a weird keyboard makes it very flexible, so things like emulation become easily available without having to resort to hacking your console or jumping through dev mode hoops. The Deck is great for use in circumstances where you can't get behind a full desktop, like in public transport, or when you just want a quick session without having to boot/update/log in/load/save/quit/shut down. The sleep/resume functionality is very good, so quick five minute bursts in games that would otherwise take half an hour to load are suddenly a possibility. It works for gaming on the couch, in bed, in public, anywhere but at your desk, really. I suppose you could also use it as a desktop computer if you attach it to a USB C dock, but I don't think that's the primary intention of the device. If you're content with your desktop gaming experience and don't see yourself gaming anywhere else, the Deck is probably just not for you.
unhammer 3y ago
Still not available in Norway :(
- iodbh 3y ago
  I live in Norway and got one - you just need a delivery address. I used a friend’s; but there are forwarding services as well
- RMPR 3y ago
  Even if it is was available in Norway, it'd probably be cheaper to order it from abroad anyway. I was baffled by how expensive "niche" gadgets are here. For example the Kinesis advantage 360 is 8k NOK[0] compared to $479 in the US, so it was actually less expensive to order from there and pay the customs than to get in locally. This was last December, before the NOK value fell off a cliff. 0: https://www.sono.no/kontormobler/ergonomisk-kontortilbehor/ergonomiske-tastatur/kinesis-advantage360-pro-tastatur-zmk-bluetooth-multichannel-620877.html https://www.sono.no/kontormobler/ergonomisk-kontortilbehor/e...
djhope99 3y ago
So pleased with my steam deck. So far I have played a bunch of old classics I brought 10 years or so ago which worked flawlessly, now playing “Return to Monkey Island”. I cannot spend time sitting at a PC playing games these days with kids around, being able to pick it up and put it down on demand is frankly amazing. It is the best thing I’ve owned for years.
LeSaucy 3y ago
I love seeing mastodon links on the front of hackernews.
sspiff 3y ago
I bought a Steam Deck, I used it a bit but honestly not as much as I expected. I did however finally manage to dump Windows from all my machines, apart from my VR sim racing rig, and now play everything on my Linux desktop or laptop. If it doesn't run, at this point I just pick something else to play. Steam Deck has pushed the state of the art of Wine/Proton/DXVK/... so far it's mostly just a plug and play experience, I've not had any issues at all. Often runs more reliably than native Linux ports.
- nicce 3y ago
  They might be pushing even more... Apparently lead graphics developer of Asahi Linux works also for Valve now [1]. If you have followed her work, such a talent. [1]: https://rosenzweig.io/resume.pdf https://rosenzweig.io/resume.pdf
  - fomine3 3y ago
    I've seen some post that FOSS dev worked for Valve as contractor. It's great that my payment for games finally go for FOSS developers and they develop FOSS. Also they expand real world usage of GNU/Linux (Linux Desktop!). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605865 I wasn't a big fan of Steam so I've bought games from random store, but I'll buy any games from Steam as possible.
  - sspiff 3y ago
    Her work on Mesa & free drivers is amazing, truly seems like a generational talent.
- dagmx 3y ago
  Dropping Windows has been the biggest advantage of it for me. Though the irony isn’t lost that pretty much nothing I use on it actually targets the OS it is running.
  - djhope99 3y ago
    Ha!! Agreed. I had a little chuckle the other day playing a steam game that said “Windows Build” .
stefandesu 3y ago
I'm very curious about the Steam Deck (especially because it runs Linux), but it's just too big for my taste. There are other companies making very similar devices (which are often more powerful too) that are smaller (like Ayaneo [1]), but so far they are all running on Windows. (Seems like they are making their own Linux-based OS though.) [1]: https://www.ayaneo.com https://www.ayaneo.com
- smileybarry 3y ago
  If you have a friend with a Steam Deck, I highly recommend just giving it a shot. I thought my Switch was too big and even got a Switch Lite, then when I got a Steam Deck (“worst case I’ll just dock it”) it was so much nicer. The grips cancel some of the size out, and it’s more comfortable (to me) than my (full size) Switch, despite the weight differences. I wish there was a Switch Lite-sized one capable enough, though. But so far it’s all either: throttle, low battery life, no support, or extremely expensive (e.g.: the $1000+ ones).
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    But it's big, and heavy though. I read that depending on the size of their hand, small weaker hands cannot handle deck that good and will get hurt.
    - smileybarry 3y ago
      It is, but it’s not too far from a Switch — 422g vs 669g.
      - fendy3002 3y ago
        Did you realize that it's still ~50% increase in weight? Though agree that OP need to try it themselves, but still beware that some people with small hands get hurt playing deck due to the weight.
        isoprophlex 3y ago
dcchambers 3y ago
It's an astonishing achievement from Valve. The plug-and-play nature is truly miraculous...I expected to have to do a ton of hackery to make games work but the vast majority of things I want to play work great out of the box. I'm a very happy Deck owner from day one, despite having a relatively powerful gaming PC and a Switch. As a dad with two very young kids I don't get much time for gaming, but the Deck helps me find that time and I am loving playing through some of my backlog of controller-friendly games. Also a plug for https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/ which has thousands of user-submitted reviews and optimization fixes/tweaks for playing games on the Steam Deck.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  I think they're to be commended on focusing in areas that aren't obvious, but have a lot of benefit. My immediate example for this is 'gamescope'. It's like a mini compositor that really improves the edges between X/Wayland For those using Linux outside of a Deck, look into setting it up!
  - pfych 3y ago
    Wow Gamescope[^1] looks great! Definitely going to install this on my main system for playing games that like to wrestle with displays and resolution! [^1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope
    - aleden 3y ago
      I have an Intel GPU (HD Graphics 520) and gamescope doesn't work for me under arch Linux :( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/356 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/356
- cmur 3y ago
  > I expected to have to do a ton of hackery to make games work but the vast majority of things I want to play work great out of the box This was my first sentiment as well, but found myself in the same exact position as you. I almost was a little disappointed because I was looking forward to playing with the underlying OS, but even some of these heavy AAA titles run really smooth considering the hardware they employed for the deck.
A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
I have the 'higher' version and I was frankly astonished at how well it handled Kingdom Come. Absolutely ridiculous. Yes, it does get hot when I do that. Normally, I use it to play path of exile when I am down.
tomashubelbauer 3y ago
I cannot sing high enough praises for the Steam Deck. I am someone who virtually never plays computer games. One exception is Flatout 2 which is a game I really like and would sit down to play for an hour or two every year or so in the past ten years. But in that decade I have switched to macOS and even though there is a Flatout 2 port in the App Store, it is 32 bit and thus not playable anymore either. I bought the game on GOG so I can get the installer any time and it doesn't require online functionality (it has a multiplayer mode but I doubt it works anymore) but in recent years it was a real pain to get it to work so I could play for a while. CrossOver is a legend but this year I felt it was too much effort to even download it and set up FO2 in it so I bought the SteamDeck and tried the game on it. It works flawlessly! I have spent more time playing the game this year than I have ever before except maybe the year it came out (2006 I think) when I played it a lot. Since that experience I have installed Blood: Fresh Supply and I have been enjoying replaying that classic a lot. It has been like two decades since I last played that. If it wasn't for the Steam Deck and its specific-purposeness and how easy it is to just pick up and go, I would probably give up on gaming altogether. So if you're on a fence and you are someone who likes older games, go for the Steam Deck! It is a joy.
- COGlory 3y ago
  Did you buy a Steam Deck specifically for Flatout 2?
  - tomashubelbauer 3y ago
    Yes. I know it sounds a bit weird, but I figured I would just sell it if I didn't like it.
- Falkon1313 3y ago
  Ah, I'd forgotten how much fun Flatout was! Used to have a blast playing that, Burnout, and Carmageddon. Lately I've been playing Redout Enhanced Edition which was free on Epic awhile back. Bought a new controller to play it. I considered getting a Steam Deck, but I just don't see myself carrying it around to play it somewhere else. And if I'm going to be here in my comfy chair at my computer with a big screen anyway, it doesn't make sense.
currymj 3y ago
Valve had a sequence of strange failed experiments -- the Steam Controller, Steam Machines/SteamOS, Steam Link. But somehow these all came together to make the Steam Deck which is an astounding success. I don't know if Valve are geniuses or just incredibly lucky.
- jckahn 3y ago
  It’s an overnight success that was years in the making!
  - TillE 3y ago
    Exactly. It's a really big leap for a pure software/services company to start making hardware, and there's no way you get the Steam Deck - at least not a good Steam Deck - without the experience that comes from making those earlier products.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  To me it seems Valve correctly realised their Steam Machines failed due to software and too many different hardware combinations, and since then prioritized getting games to run better on Linux before trying again with a single device that's supported well and can run thousands of games at release.
- nani8ot 3y ago
  Yes. They might be a financial failure, but my Steam Link works great for me and still receives updates. The Steam Controller also has a loyal fanbase with them being more expensive now then what Valve wanted to clear inventory. I don't think it's luck. After the Steam Machines Valve worked for years on proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d) and AMD graphics drivers to fix game compatibility. Experience with selling hardware themselves had Valve with the Index already.
- gfodor 3y ago
  Don't forget the Steam Deck is a bridge to the standalone VR headset that will run games like Alyx.
- 3y ago
kojiromike 3y ago
The steam deck is great, but I still think it's lacking in support for peripherals. For example, racing wheels, yokes and rudder pedals are inconsistent. My Saitek yoke works, but the rudder pedals cannot be detected. I wouldn't be that bothered if neither one worked, but the inconsistency makes it a lot worse. A "no maintenance" sign on a dirt road is far superior to a well-paved road leading to a sheer cliff.
pmarreck 3y ago
Is the "% Verified" going down just because the number of games that are either "Playable" (or "Unsupported" is going up?
thih9 3y ago
As someone who doesn't use Steam and Steam Deck, what's the difference between "playable" and "verified"? I.e. what kind of bugs or unsupported features am I likely to encounter when I play one vs the other?
- aquova 3y ago
  It varies quite a bit, and there are some items that are pretty minor that will cause a game to not be officially verified. For example, some of the 2D Final Fantasy games run very well without any issues on the Steam Deck, but are only listed as playable because they require the use of the on-screen keyboard to enter in character names.
- madelyn 3y ago
  It honestly varies by game, but in my experience "Playable" is usually a great to okay experience but has small text, a launcher you need to use a touch screen for, or maybe only partial controller support. Game breaking bugs are rare in playable titles from what I've seen. The majority of games I play on SD are "only" playable and it's still a great experience.
- robrtsql 3y ago
  The difference is not huge. The big one is that, to be "Verified", there are some usability criteria that need to be met (the game's text needs to be legible on the Steam Deck screen, you need to be able to launch the game without any hacky tweaks like clicking around in a launcher using the touch-screen or something, the game needs to basically work out-of-the-box with the Steam Deck's sticks and buttons, etc) and if those aren't met then they will provide a 'blurb' which explains which ones are missing. Other than that, I have found that lots of games which aren't "Verified" play perfectly, and some games which are "Verified" don't launch at all (because Valve said 'hey! it works!', gave it the Verified badge, and then a month later the developers pushed out an update for the game which broke something for Steam Deck users).
- Derbasti 3y ago
  Playable most of the time means "this game requires a keyboard, so remember to press Steam+X for the on-screen keyboard when you're asked to enter your character name", or "fonts are a bit small on the small screen", or "there's no built-in performance preset, so you'll have to set it to medium manually". Essentially, complete non-issues most of the time.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Proton is such a huge achievement. The SteamDeck isn't for me (don't care for mobile form factor). But this work also benefits me on a Chromebook using its experimental Steam support. It runs Steam and games in a container that works well with Proton.
- parabyl 3y ago
  Proton is really quite incredible as a compatibility layer, I've not seen any performance drops (if anything, only small performance gains, which I assume is due to fewer background processes in the OS), but most incredible is the frequency with which Proton is updated and worked on. I'd tried gaming on linux before and gave up after a week or two of configuration attempts. I had put it off for ages and tried with proton on a dual boot system earlier this year, and instantly had access to everything installed on windows. It also means I can actually recommend linux to people with older machines trying to squeeze a little extra out of their lifespan, without having to tell them it's an uphill battle to get gaming working as expected.
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    The one very specific oddity depending on how old the system is, at make sure the GPU supports Vulkan. Yes, you can force it down to OpenGL but compatibility is low and buggy. Not the fault.of proton as they are just focusing on the path forward.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Some people say that a thing how Steam Deck performs good is thanks to shader cache. There's only one GPU(SoC) SKU for Steam Deck like normal gaming console, so shader cache can be precompiled for Steam games, unlike PC.
- G3rn0ti 3y ago
  The company that’s really behind Proton [1] sells „CrossOver“ as a commercial product to run Windows applications on MacOS, Linux and ChromeOS with enhanced compatibility compared to free Wine. IIRC they started out to selling „CrossOver Office“ running MS Office seamlessly on a Linux desktop. If you want to support their effort you could buy a license for under $100 and run many Windows titles and games w/o emulation or the Steam client. [1] https://www.codeweavers.com/ https://www.codeweavers.com/
elromulous 3y ago
This is the year of the Linux desktop! Somewhat tongue in cheek, but also not kidding. I realize the deck is not a desktop, but this is by far the most penetration Linux has had on something that is actually a consumer facing computer (vs an appliance).
- AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
  The Linux desktop is still a subpar experience compared to Windows 10+ or macOS - that said, it is definitely now a viable platform for "PC gamers" who want to move away from Windows for whatever reason - or eg. devs like me who use Linux to code and who may be tired of dual booting. That said for me if it works 95% of the time, I still prefer dual booting. I spent a few months trying Steam on Ubuntu and it was great - I was surprised just how transparent the experience was since Steam handles Proton/Wine etc for you. But after seeing limitations like Oculus software to do some Quest + LInk PC VR, or Steam VR etc. I was like, I 'm just going to keep Ubuntu as my daily OS to surf and code etc, and I will reboot into Windows for gaming. Then I dont have to worry about any of the small print. But I am hopeful. Those are great developments and within a few years we might see all the VR as well supported with no hassle in Linux. BUT... interestingly with the recent developments on macOS, and their own "proton like" API - the macOS platform may also become a viable one... who knows.. if it works with external GPUs for example. Exciting times for gaming!
- kelvie 3y ago
  This is probably not true due to Chromebooks running Linux.
ekianjo 3y ago
If you like this graph, there's a lot more here about the state of the Steam Deck right now: https://boilingsteam.com/valve-is-accelerating-the-validation-of-games-from-2023-for-the-steam-deck-like-never-before-including-games-not-even-released-yet/ https://boilingsteam.com/valve-is-accelerating-the-validatio...
lysecret 3y ago
I can only join the praise for the Steam Deck. For the launch of Diablo4 I bought a 3k gaming laptop which I returned because the Steam Deck was the superior experience for me.
devinprater 3y ago
This is really cool for Linux! Hopefully as people figure out the SteamDeck is a PC running Arch and KDE, the Steamdeck will become some folks' computer. Of course, the Steamdeck doesn't have a screen reader, so I'd have to put Windows on it, which kinda defeats the purpose, but I'm glad other people can enjoy a mainstream Linux machine.
dimgl 3y ago
I'm currently using a Steam Deck to play through Diablo IV and it's absolutely amazing how well Diablo IV runs. Once you get it working, it works great. That being said it did take me an unbelievable amount of tinkering to get it to work. And unfortunately SteamOS comes with all of the typical bugginess you would expect from a Linux OS baked into a handheld device (keyboard disappears, trackpads stop working randomly, UI elements overlap with no way of removing them, etc.) Still, the Steam Deck is a freaking achievement. The battery life is unbelievably good for a device of this kind. If a new Steam Deck comes out with an OLED screen it's a day 1 purchase for me.
- belmarca 3y ago
  Maybe you didn't know what you were doing? There are some tutorials to follow online which makes it easy. For non-SD users reading this: you can get D4 running in about the time it takes to download Battle.net and the game itself. You basically install Battle.net on the deck, and then create a launcher from within Steam. That's it.
  - CardenB 3y ago
    I’m pretty sure you have to install the launcher through wine and then install it. Then you have to configure the right capability layer through the steam launcher IIRC
    - belmarca 3y ago
      I did everything from within Steam. Set up the installer as a Steam app, then set up the BNet launcher as a steam app, and done. It took a few minutes, basically waiting for the installation and download.
  - dimgl 3y ago
    > Maybe you didn't know what you were doing? Okay, I'm on Hacker News, what are the odds I don't know what I'm doing? You don't "just install" Diablo IV on the Deck. You have to add the Battle.net Setup binary as a non-Steam app, or go through Lutris. I chose to not use Lutris and instead go through Steam which requires you to go to desktop mode, install it, and then change the paths from the setup binary to the Battle.net Launcher binary, which means going through the file system to look for it, and the paths could differ depending on whether you installed it on an SD card or the SSD. Apologies for being defensive. I want to make sure people who read this thread take the positive reception with a grain of salt. I had to do all of this as a brand new Steam Deck user. All of this was made more complicated by a couple of UI bugs in the Steam UI and the fact that desktop mode has a bug where the keyboards and trackpads stop working randomly unless Steam big picture is enabled. I had to discover all of this through Google searches. A couple more problems: one of the tutorials online forgot to mention you have to change the launch directory as well. That was about an hour wasted trying to figure out why Battle.net was not launching. Additionally, you can't download games with the screen off. That's because pressing the power button behaves like a computer, in that it makes the entire OS go to sleep. You have to literally keep your Steam Deck on in order for it to download the game.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
I game on linux so that's good for me I wish Steam Deck wasn't this poorly designed, I'd have bought one Hopefully their 2nd gen will look better, smaller and with a better battery Unless they release a 2nd gen of this baby: https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4 https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4
- mateo- 3y ago
  what's wrong with the design? That link looks sketchy, btw.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    Too big, weird button placement, and I'm not a fan of the overall aesthetic > That link looks sketchy, btw. Yeah, it kinda is weird, but that's your typical Chinese website.. lol GPD is the company that pioneered the handheld gaming PC form factor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbFPXLB7GI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbFPXLB7GI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K9ByWPqYtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K9ByWPqYtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjrbHFv_dA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjrbHFv_dA And this one, 6 years ago already! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lslcH-T1E0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lslcH-T1E0o Makes you realize Microsoft could have owned the handheld market if they weren't this incompetent https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1648385366033076224 https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/164838536603307622...
    - mateo- 3y ago
      Yea, I getcha. I wonder how much repair-ability limited the design. Chunkier components is probably much easier for the common person to repair. I wouldn't want to open up my iPhone or Switch as an example, but feel like I'd be super comfortable taking apart the Deck.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    And you got downvoted for asking me a question Something fishy going on
htk 3y ago
The Steam Deck makes my daily ride on the stationary bike a very fun activity.
gotlou 3y ago
This is amazing news, and I've found that thanks to Proton patches being upstreamed by Valve and CodeWeavers, not to mention the Wine community, that games that run on Proton tend to run using vanilla Wine as well, thus improving compatibility for Wine in general!
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
Proton is god-tier. I can open pretty much any game and it just runs. You aren't stuck in Windows anymore.
- zhynn 3y ago
  I have yet to not be able to run a game. I have had a couple that didn't launch, but when I configured them to use Proton Experimenal, they started right up. This includes demos for new games that are not at all intended to be run on a deck. I have been so impressed.
irusensei 3y ago
Sometimes I find the Proton version of a game working better than native. For example Pathfinder Kingmaker which has some kind of interface bug that makes it difficulty to progress after a certain point because the kingdom management interface doesn’t work correctly. Loaded proton version, no bug and the performance is waaaaay better. Smooth gameplay. I’m guessing here that native games are often linked to some SDL version or something similar and might not work well with a considerable newer system.
- porcc 3y ago
  https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-plays-elden-ring-better-than-a-dollar5000-pc-thanks-to-valve https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-plays-elden-ring-b...
SubiculumCode 3y ago
Now do Office, and I'd say goodbye.
miga 3y ago
If more and more games are tested and verified on Steam Deck, why less and less games are playable under most recent version of Ubuntu? Since I upgraded to 23.04, most of Paradox and many others refuse to play. Is it something that Ubuntu broke, or a different Linux kernel that breaks OpenGL?
shaggie76 3y ago
It's an impressive technical achievement, no question, but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE). So I wonder about the metric for "playable" -- is a 4x greater chance of crashing when using your Steam Deck vs your PC still "playable"? And I wonder if players, who can't tell if a crash is related to emulation or a bug in the game, will blame the game developer when it isn't really fair to hold them accountable.
- Uvix 3y ago
  Depends on how much it's crashing in the first place. The difference between a 1/2500 event and a 1/10000 event is probably not going to be noticed, but the difference between a 1/2 and a 1/8 event probably is.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE). Do Windows games work on Linux? No, there's little Valve can do to change that, bless their hearts. But it's a very Reddit Social Media friendly statistic. It doesn't square with the reality from people like you, who actually make games with an audience. And anyway, if you want to build for Linux, use Unity, so Proton is kind of a moot point, and also, you'll be doing that to sell on Switch anyway, porting your game like Vampire Survivor, Slay the Spire, etc. did, if you care about that audience. Vulkan will be fully deprecated before Proton can substantively reimplement enough Windows for non-middleware games. And anyway, Vulkan is awful, it's poorly supported by all the vendors, including Valve's own, but again, it doesn't matter. The bigger picture: Steam already sells so many copies of games to so many people who spend 0 minutes playing those games. The idea of playing a game is enough to sell it. So in a sense, does it matter if your game doesn't work for the people who bought it? Like in the sense of objective reality? RGB? People buy that stuff. It wouldn't be on everything if it didn't sell. The Steam Deck is a cozy idea of gaming people like to buy. They could also blow $300 on a video card overpowered for playing Overwatch and League. These trends don't make sense in an objective reality, but the product is already psychological for so many people. Brad Wardell, pariah and guy who was, ultimately, totally utterly right, figured this out ages ago: > You focus on people who buy your stuff... One of the jokes... is how "ugly" WindowBlinds skins are (though there are plenty of awesome ones too). But the thing is, the people who buy WindowBlinds tend to like a different style of skin than the people who would never buy it in the first place.(https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/303512/piracy-pc-gaming https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/303512/piracy-pc-gamin... 2008) And anyway, who cares? At the end of the day, you go and buy Windows on your handheld. Would people spend $15 on an OEM license of Windows for the Deck to have their games not have this problem? Probably. It is good for the planet that Valve is trying to make WINE emulation work, but it's not doing anything for the consumer - Unity is, middlewares are - and it's not doing anything for the game developer - more games would sell if it was just Windows - so really, pass your judgement in an objective reality. I really don't see the point of DXVK.
metaphor 3y ago
I suspect the metrics are actually better than reported. For example, Skul: The Hero Slayer[1][2] is a relatively popular indie game whose Steam Deck compatibility is officially "Unsupported" because "graphics settings cannot be configured to run well", but if you ignored the warning and installed it anyways, you'd be scratching your head in confusion trying to find anything broken compared to PC. Imagining NEOWIZ/SouthPAW Games is liable to have lost quite a bit of revenue because of this seemingly incorrect compatibility listing alone. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147560/Skul_The_Hero_Slayer/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147560/Skul_The_Hero_Sla... [2] https://steamdb.info/app/1147560/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/1147560/charts/
- snowpalmer 3y ago
  I have the same experience. Skul works great on the Deck. I initially didn't even try it until I saw a comment from someone telling me it works. The "Unsupported" tag is intimidating. Now I'll test out even the Unsupported ones.
darthrupert 3y ago
In year 2021, it was more a rule than exception that a Windows game would not work on Steam. In year 2022, it switched. I haven't found a Windows game that doesn't work on Steam. And amusingly, I have found a few Windows games that don't work on Windows.
rldjbpin 3y ago
a massive asterix for the title - the 75% is out of the 10k or so games tested by Valve thus far. as someone who's been trying to run games on linux for almost a decade, we are still a long way away from being able to just launch games on steam (in linux or with steam deck) without thinking twice. despite the progress in emulating windows code in linux, you need devs to step in for weird cases such as anticheat or another layer of DRM companies like Ubisoft and EA put on their titles. given steam deck's success tho, i am hopeful to see some effort from developers to make it more accessible to just launch a game on deck and have a good experience. even if it might be down to just supporting less powerful hardware. it might also be a blessing to only have a limited subset of titles given how vast steam catalog is. my library is already too big to catch up on.
themoonisachees 3y ago
The actual percentage is higher. Steam has a lot of games they mark as unplayable that are very much playable with only a few tweaks, but since they don't just work right when you press play they say it's unplayable. ProtonDB is better, though it does move slowly. Basically if protonDB says it isn't borked, the game will run.
mikhael28 3y ago
lol I game on my 2019 MacBook Pro 16'. If you run Arch on it, you can use Steam Proton - or use Bootcamp with it. You will need a fan, but it works really well - you can run the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk (albeit not at 60fps) and many, many games very well. Steam Deck is another piece of hardware, you can get away with using a lot less.

635 points by ekianjo 3y ago

dolmen 3y ago

Cool misleading stat. Games not tested are out of the 100%. This is NOT 75% of Steam catalog.

ekianjo 3y ago
"Games Tested" != "All Games"

lom 3y ago

Why has the ratio of verified dropped?

ekianjo 3y ago
Because the ratio of verified was too optimistic in the beginning - and potentially the current ratio is closer to the reality, with a minority of games released on PC actually made to work well on a smaller screen. Note that requiring a launcher, or keyboard input also make the games land in playable territory even though it works perfectly otherwise.
TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
They probably have put the most effort into making popular games work, but as time as gone one, they've tried to “verify” more and more less popular games. I'm assuming here that there is a missing “not previously reviewed” segment in the graph, i.e. there are less games at the start than at the end.
blamazon 3y ago
There's a finite amount of validation effort available and presumably in the early days there was a focus on highlighting the games that best demonstrated the Deck's selling points. It stands to reason that as time goes by and the low hanging fruit has been picked, validation effort instead goes into more and more obscure or less obviously Deck friendly games.
Zekio 3y ago
considering the amount of new games each day on steam, it doesn't surprise me
izacus 3y ago
The long tail of Steam (PC) games aren't really made for small screens and controllers. For a game to be "verified", it needs to fully support controllers, have readable text on a 8" 1280x800 screen and run well on Deck's hardware using Proton. As more older Steam games went through the process, less % of games actually fulfill those conditions (main reason I'm personally seeing is either "small text" or a launcher that requires use of mouse to click "Play" before the game starts).
- fendy3002 3y ago
  Even witcher 3 that's verified have small text. Not too bad but I prefer it to be slightly larger.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    It seems like a lot of games that would be green/verified are classed as yellow/playable solely because of small text, which is equivalent to being verified if you use your docked Steam Deck as a cheap gaming PC first and a handheld second.
    - fendy3002 3y ago
      Yeah but the situation isn't limited to deck, though deck makes it worse since the screen is smaller than average monitor. Modern games without a big ass high res monitor will have text that's too small to be enjoyable.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I believe too they don't even waste time verifying indie games that have too few sales. My game was written for the Steam Deck but I don't hope to ever get my title "verified". I inly sold maybe 200 copies, ha ha.
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    What is the dev experience like? Did you do your development on the Steam Deck itself?
esjeon 3y ago
My theories: (1) Steam got a lot of new games. (2) Compatibility issues found deep inside games. (3) No compat issues, but issues with Steam Deck specifically.
bravetraveler 3y ago
1. Hardware requirements increase with time while the platform being verified against remains the same. They may run... just not well due to hardware limitations 2. Varies depending on how many games implement incompatible things like certain anti-cheats. Admittedly, this may only account for a small amount. They come/go in waves -- eg: looter/shooter trend 3. Steam Deck verified is a more strict qualification than Linux in general; tiny screen/resolution, gamepads, etc. 4. Finally, inconsistency between the rate-of-verification and rate-of-addition - these are not locked Probably more, these are what immediately come to mind

barney54 3y ago

For people that own a Steam Deck, how do you like it? And how do you use it? I would like to talk myself into buying one, but I can’t think of a decent use case.

jeroenhd 3y ago
I love my deck. It's my preferred way to play games these days. For better or for worse, it's also been the reason I've spent more time playing games this year than the years before. The console like quality gives it a different feel compared to a controller hooked up to a gaming PC in my opinion. The fast sleep/resume also makes it super easy to pick up and play for a short while without having to worry about not making it to the next save point in time. SteamOS/HoloISO is so good that I seriously consider installing it on my next gaming computer when the time to upgrade eventually comes. It has tons of issues with Nvidia hardware (as with any kind of Linux distro) but other than that it's one of the first times I've seen Linux for the mainstream done right. Read only system images, all software installed in the user directory makes for a very stable hassle free update experience. You can unlock the system partition if you want, but I intend to keep it read only for as long as I can. It's not some kind of magical machine that will make you experience fun, though. If you're already happy with the amount of game time you're getting and you don't think you'll use it, don't get one. It is what it is, a handheld console. I bought mine knowing I'd probably spend a significant amount of time on it playing games in bed and on the go, and that's where it has really shined for me, especially when I was too sick to sleep for a few days. If you've already got a gaming PC or console and a tablet/large smartphone, consider getting a comfortable controller grip for that instead and stream the games over your network. I've got pretty good experiences streaming games over WiFi and even over the internet this way. It's fiddly to set up, but it'll work for significantly less money than a separate game console. If you've got money to throw at your gaming hobby, also consider more powerful alternatives. I think the 1200x800 screen is fine for the Deck screen size, but some people don't like it. The machine is also clearly optimized to play games at that resolution, hooking it up to a monitor can quickly show the limitations of a 15W chip. There are more powerful gaming handhelds out there, often running Windows and some kind of homebrew console environment, for a significantly higher price. If you know anyone with a Deck, ask them to try it out for a few minutes.
3y ago

m00dy 3y ago

oh finally, we see linux gaming rising.

esjeon 3y ago
... but is this the year of linux desktop...?
- ekianjo 3y ago
  nobody cares about the year of the Linux desktop anymore. Linux is already everywhere.
  - Ygg2 3y ago
    Linux is only on servers/routers. And locked in Android's attic, in a padded cell.
- Ygg2 3y ago
  Year of Serenity OS I gave up on Linux desktop long time ago.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  Don't know about desktop [1], but it could be the year of the Linux handheld. [1] my personal YotLD was '99.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >the year of the Linux handheld. Android achieved that many years ago.
    - Synaesthesia 3y ago
      Android is based on Linux but it's still not open source, got a lot of closed source stuff on top of it. I wouldn't exactly call it "Linux" which generally means GNU/Linux

lohit244 3y ago

Still waiting to get wider availability in other countries. Probably should just wait till Steam Deck 2 at this point

ekianjo 3y ago
You can probably ask someone on HN to send it over to you.
taink 3y ago
I think they were planning to support the first generation fairly long-term, so you probably don't want to wait for a Steam Deck 2. I think I've seen people that can't get their hands on it through "official" means get their own by arranging a delivery through someone else on Reddit for instance. I don't know if you'd be comfortable with that solution though. EDIT: they are planning to support the Steam Deck long-term, but they said nothing about the first generation -- my bad[1]. [1]: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/press/book/steamDeck_booklet_EN.pdf#page=26 https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/pres...
smileybarry 3y ago
I cross-shipped mine via a US proxy address. Cost more but I don’t regret it. Also — check local resellers, some importers just set up a deal with Valve but don’t appear on Steam.

cloverich 3y ago

Though I've long since given up on my gaming days, I purchased a Steam deck last month, mostly out of impulse. I'm frankly astonished at the amount of playable games, and also the amount of quality indie games out there. I spent $50 picking on-sale indies and quickly had a backlog. Its been more enjoyable (and surprisingly comfortable) than I expected too. I'm definitely in the very casual crowd at this point, gaming an hour or two a week on the couch, and its hit that sweet spot. Purchased the base model; overall impressed with the quality of the device too. So much more comfortable than I was expecting, I just rest it on my lap. Its great.

SteveNuts 3y ago
I mostly play managemen/city builder style games like Cities Skylines or Factorio. Have you tried any of those types of games and if so what's been your experience?
- ekianjo 3y ago
  the trackpads work well with these kind of games. As long as you don't expect to act in urgency - typically building / management games work very well with this device.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  I play a ton of these on Deck. Very satisfied with it. I am also a pause - command - unpause kind of player though. But the trackpads work better than you'd expect, and often have community layouts for the controller than add things that make it even nicer than playing with mouse and keyboard (the rotary menus for city overlays are awesome)
  - klik99 3y ago
    “Better than you expect” but still not ideal. It’s doable, but I just don’t get the same enjoyment out of mouse heavy games. But with cloud save it can be great to dip in when not at the computer

KingOfCoders 3y ago

Has someone sold ther Steam Deck for a ROG Ally? Why? Has it the same compatibility?

ekianjo 3y ago
No idea about such stats, but the ROG Ally has several problems: - Windows as the key interface - very poor battery life (even worse than the Deck!) - no trackpads so this limits what you can ever play with it to games made for gamepads - none of the SteamOS goodness
- fendy3002 3y ago
  Compared with deck, no suspend continue. And I read that the button can stuck and it can get hot.
  - calini 3y ago
    Both consoles get about as hot, but yeah, no good Sleep option in Windows is a shame.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      > Both consoles get about as hot The problem specific to the Ally right now is that it seems to get too hot where the SD card reader is, causing SD cards to fry for some users: https://www.dexerto.com/tech/asus-rog-ally-has-a-bizarre-overheating-issue-2193923/ https://www.dexerto.com/tech/asus-rog-ally-has-a-bizarre-ove... . I'm sure this will be fixed in a future hardware revision, but for now it seems worth waiting on the Ally for them to hammer out the first-generation kinks. Still, I'm happy that the Ally exists, both as competition for Valve and to help prove that this PC form factor has legs.
      - calini 3y ago
        Exactly, competition is good!

easyThrowaway 3y ago

The only lingering issue I've found while playing on the steam deck is that a lot of DX8-9 games are somewhat missing a few shaders and lighting effects, I guess due to the way wine approximates them. Usually the dgvoodoo2 dll wrapper is good enough to restore them. It's quite hard to find a game that doesn't work at all, the most common cause usually being an external launcher trying to mess with the system in ways that wine doesn't agree with.

cynicalsecurity 3y ago

Which also means they are running on Linux. This is mind-blowing.

ekianjo 3y ago
According to other sources (ProtonDB), about 80% of a much larger subset of Steam games run on Linux (some worse than others) - next milestone is 90% I guess, a couple of years down the road.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Some of those games 'require' an unofficial version of Steam's Proton which includes support for features in the underlying components that the official version can't ship. Mostly it's an issue for video codecs in games (patents are the issue here), or games that use a less popular API. (From windows! Which has ~3 decades of APIs from multiple vendors. Let alone 10s (10-100 IDK) different ways of playing back audio or a video, or both at the same time.) Some of the changes are simply more bleeding edge patches or game specific tweaks that are included faster than official releases include them.
kibwen 3y ago
From a user's perspective they're running on Linux, though from the games' perspective they're running on Windows, thanks to Proton (based on Wine).
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Having written even basic tools in native code for Linux and run into compatibility issues (glibc versions, ugh), I'm not surprised. Wine is probably the best cross-distro Linux platform, especially for closed source products that don't get compiled for every specific repo. Flatpak/AppImage would also work but that lacks the raw system access that many games depend on (even if that system access is secretly emulated by Wine).
- haunter 3y ago
  See the famous "Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux" article https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624

sylware 3y ago

Do you know: titles with a native elf/linux build which does not run in the official steam runtime won't be validated. Some titles are getting c++ ABI/glibc issues because if they build "outside" the steam official steam runtime they will be hit full frontal by c++ and glibc planned obsolescence (they would have to control in a fine grained way the symbols/versions they link their binaries with... feature not provided by the sourceware binutils...).

mariusor 3y ago
I mean, Steam/linux32 is the "platform" to release games on for linux. As much as I'd like to compile random game binaries on my own machine with my own glibc that's probably never going to happen.
- sylware 3y ago
  Some devs do link their elf/linux binaries on arch elf/linux, and then have symbol version issues once running in the steam runtime. They have to link with the steam runtime and not with the arch elf/linux binaries.

Eumenes 3y ago

Is this supposed to challenge the switch? Personally, as a lifelong PC gamer, I've never been able to get into handheld/mobile stuff, or even consoles - its not even the screen size, but the controls and overall experience. I want to be upright in a chair, with a full keyboard + mouse in front of me. I like to use my dual screens to research stuff in downtime or check on settings/optimizations. Is this primarily used on the couch, or in public whilst out and about?

JKCalhoun 3y ago
You can drop the Steam Deck into a dock (Steam Dock?) and have your desktop monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk-chair.... But at that point what is the point, I guess.
- nucleardog 3y ago
  As someone that has probably used my deck docked at my desk more than anything… 1. Suspend and resume. If I’ve got a quick 20 minutes I can hit the button, change the input on a monitor, pick up my controller and play. No need to shut a bunch of stuff down to free up RAM, wait for the game to start, wait for a save to load, etc. And no need to worry about getting to a save point, finish a cut scene… just suspend. 2. It doesn’t heat my office up a bazillion degrees like my desktop.
jeroenhd 3y ago
You can play switch games on the Deck but I wouldn't call it a Switch competitor. The Switch is targeted at family gaming with colorful multiplayer games and inoffensive titles. The Deck is just a handheld console. It's a successor to the PSP more than it's a competitor to anything else. The fact it's implemented as a laptop with a weird keyboard makes it very flexible, so things like emulation become easily available without having to resort to hacking your console or jumping through dev mode hoops. The Deck is great for use in circumstances where you can't get behind a full desktop, like in public transport, or when you just want a quick session without having to boot/update/log in/load/save/quit/shut down. The sleep/resume functionality is very good, so quick five minute bursts in games that would otherwise take half an hour to load are suddenly a possibility. It works for gaming on the couch, in bed, in public, anywhere but at your desk, really. I suppose you could also use it as a desktop computer if you attach it to a USB C dock, but I don't think that's the primary intention of the device. If you're content with your desktop gaming experience and don't see yourself gaming anywhere else, the Deck is probably just not for you.

unhammer 3y ago

Still not available in Norway :(

iodbh 3y ago
I live in Norway and got one - you just need a delivery address. I used a friend’s; but there are forwarding services as well
RMPR 3y ago
Even if it is was available in Norway, it'd probably be cheaper to order it from abroad anyway. I was baffled by how expensive "niche" gadgets are here. For example the Kinesis advantage 360 is 8k NOK[0] compared to $479 in the US, so it was actually less expensive to order from there and pay the customs than to get in locally. This was last December, before the NOK value fell off a cliff. 0: https://www.sono.no/kontormobler/ergonomisk-kontortilbehor/ergonomiske-tastatur/kinesis-advantage360-pro-tastatur-zmk-bluetooth-multichannel-620877.html https://www.sono.no/kontormobler/ergonomisk-kontortilbehor/e...

djhope99 3y ago

So pleased with my steam deck. So far I have played a bunch of old classics I brought 10 years or so ago which worked flawlessly, now playing “Return to Monkey Island”. I cannot spend time sitting at a PC playing games these days with kids around, being able to pick it up and put it down on demand is frankly amazing. It is the best thing I’ve owned for years.

LeSaucy 3y ago

I love seeing mastodon links on the front of hackernews.

sspiff 3y ago

I bought a Steam Deck, I used it a bit but honestly not as much as I expected. I did however finally manage to dump Windows from all my machines, apart from my VR sim racing rig, and now play everything on my Linux desktop or laptop. If it doesn't run, at this point I just pick something else to play. Steam Deck has pushed the state of the art of Wine/Proton/DXVK/... so far it's mostly just a plug and play experience, I've not had any issues at all. Often runs more reliably than native Linux ports.

nicce 3y ago
They might be pushing even more... Apparently lead graphics developer of Asahi Linux works also for Valve now [1]. If you have followed her work, such a talent. [1]: https://rosenzweig.io/resume.pdf https://rosenzweig.io/resume.pdf
- fomine3 3y ago
  I've seen some post that FOSS dev worked for Valve as contractor. It's great that my payment for games finally go for FOSS developers and they develop FOSS. Also they expand real world usage of GNU/Linux (Linux Desktop!). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605865 I wasn't a big fan of Steam so I've bought games from random store, but I'll buy any games from Steam as possible.
- sspiff 3y ago
  Her work on Mesa & free drivers is amazing, truly seems like a generational talent.
dagmx 3y ago
Dropping Windows has been the biggest advantage of it for me. Though the irony isn’t lost that pretty much nothing I use on it actually targets the OS it is running.
- djhope99 3y ago
  Ha!! Agreed. I had a little chuckle the other day playing a steam game that said “Windows Build” .

stefandesu 3y ago

I'm very curious about the Steam Deck (especially because it runs Linux), but it's just too big for my taste. There are other companies making very similar devices (which are often more powerful too) that are smaller (like Ayaneo [1]), but so far they are all running on Windows. (Seems like they are making their own Linux-based OS though.) [1]: https://www.ayaneo.com https://www.ayaneo.com

smileybarry 3y ago
If you have a friend with a Steam Deck, I highly recommend just giving it a shot. I thought my Switch was too big and even got a Switch Lite, then when I got a Steam Deck (“worst case I’ll just dock it”) it was so much nicer. The grips cancel some of the size out, and it’s more comfortable (to me) than my (full size) Switch, despite the weight differences. I wish there was a Switch Lite-sized one capable enough, though. But so far it’s all either: throttle, low battery life, no support, or extremely expensive (e.g.: the $1000+ ones).
- fendy3002 3y ago
  But it's big, and heavy though. I read that depending on the size of their hand, small weaker hands cannot handle deck that good and will get hurt.
  - smileybarry 3y ago
    It is, but it’s not too far from a Switch — 422g vs 669g.
    - fendy3002 3y ago
      Did you realize that it's still ~50% increase in weight? Though agree that OP need to try it themselves, but still beware that some people with small hands get hurt playing deck due to the weight.
      - isoprophlex 3y ago

dcchambers 3y ago

It's an astonishing achievement from Valve. The plug-and-play nature is truly miraculous...I expected to have to do a ton of hackery to make games work but the vast majority of things I want to play work great out of the box. I'm a very happy Deck owner from day one, despite having a relatively powerful gaming PC and a Switch. As a dad with two very young kids I don't get much time for gaming, but the Deck helps me find that time and I am loving playing through some of my backlog of controller-friendly games. Also a plug for https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/ which has thousands of user-submitted reviews and optimization fixes/tweaks for playing games on the Steam Deck.

bravetraveler 3y ago
I think they're to be commended on focusing in areas that aren't obvious, but have a lot of benefit. My immediate example for this is 'gamescope'. It's like a mini compositor that really improves the edges between X/Wayland For those using Linux outside of a Deck, look into setting it up!
- pfych 3y ago
  Wow Gamescope[^1] looks great! Definitely going to install this on my main system for playing games that like to wrestle with displays and resolution! [^1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope
  - aleden 3y ago
    I have an Intel GPU (HD Graphics 520) and gamescope doesn't work for me under arch Linux :( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/356 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/356
cmur 3y ago
> I expected to have to do a ton of hackery to make games work but the vast majority of things I want to play work great out of the box This was my first sentiment as well, but found myself in the same exact position as you. I almost was a little disappointed because I was looking forward to playing with the underlying OS, but even some of these heavy AAA titles run really smooth considering the hardware they employed for the deck.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

I have the 'higher' version and I was frankly astonished at how well it handled Kingdom Come. Absolutely ridiculous. Yes, it does get hot when I do that. Normally, I use it to play path of exile when I am down.

tomashubelbauer 3y ago

I cannot sing high enough praises for the Steam Deck. I am someone who virtually never plays computer games. One exception is Flatout 2 which is a game I really like and would sit down to play for an hour or two every year or so in the past ten years. But in that decade I have switched to macOS and even though there is a Flatout 2 port in the App Store, it is 32 bit and thus not playable anymore either. I bought the game on GOG so I can get the installer any time and it doesn't require online functionality (it has a multiplayer mode but I doubt it works anymore) but in recent years it was a real pain to get it to work so I could play for a while. CrossOver is a legend but this year I felt it was too much effort to even download it and set up FO2 in it so I bought the SteamDeck and tried the game on it. It works flawlessly! I have spent more time playing the game this year than I have ever before except maybe the year it came out (2006 I think) when I played it a lot. Since that experience I have installed Blood: Fresh Supply and I have been enjoying replaying that classic a lot. It has been like two decades since I last played that. If it wasn't for the Steam Deck and its specific-purposeness and how easy it is to just pick up and go, I would probably give up on gaming altogether. So if you're on a fence and you are someone who likes older games, go for the Steam Deck! It is a joy.

COGlory 3y ago
Did you buy a Steam Deck specifically for Flatout 2?
- tomashubelbauer 3y ago
  Yes. I know it sounds a bit weird, but I figured I would just sell it if I didn't like it.
Falkon1313 3y ago
Ah, I'd forgotten how much fun Flatout was! Used to have a blast playing that, Burnout, and Carmageddon. Lately I've been playing Redout Enhanced Edition which was free on Epic awhile back. Bought a new controller to play it. I considered getting a Steam Deck, but I just don't see myself carrying it around to play it somewhere else. And if I'm going to be here in my comfy chair at my computer with a big screen anyway, it doesn't make sense.

currymj 3y ago

Valve had a sequence of strange failed experiments -- the Steam Controller, Steam Machines/SteamOS, Steam Link. But somehow these all came together to make the Steam Deck which is an astounding success. I don't know if Valve are geniuses or just incredibly lucky.

jckahn 3y ago
It’s an overnight success that was years in the making!
- TillE 3y ago
  Exactly. It's a really big leap for a pure software/services company to start making hardware, and there's no way you get the Steam Deck - at least not a good Steam Deck - without the experience that comes from making those earlier products.
alpaca128 3y ago
To me it seems Valve correctly realised their Steam Machines failed due to software and too many different hardware combinations, and since then prioritized getting games to run better on Linux before trying again with a single device that's supported well and can run thousands of games at release.
nani8ot 3y ago
Yes. They might be a financial failure, but my Steam Link works great for me and still receives updates. The Steam Controller also has a loyal fanbase with them being more expensive now then what Valve wanted to clear inventory. I don't think it's luck. After the Steam Machines Valve worked for years on proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d) and AMD graphics drivers to fix game compatibility. Experience with selling hardware themselves had Valve with the Index already.
gfodor 3y ago
Don't forget the Steam Deck is a bridge to the standalone VR headset that will run games like Alyx.
3y ago

kojiromike 3y ago

The steam deck is great, but I still think it's lacking in support for peripherals. For example, racing wheels, yokes and rudder pedals are inconsistent. My Saitek yoke works, but the rudder pedals cannot be detected. I wouldn't be that bothered if neither one worked, but the inconsistency makes it a lot worse. A "no maintenance" sign on a dirt road is far superior to a well-paved road leading to a sheer cliff.

pmarreck 3y ago

Is the "% Verified" going down just because the number of games that are either "Playable" (or "Unsupported" is going up?

thih9 3y ago

As someone who doesn't use Steam and Steam Deck, what's the difference between "playable" and "verified"? I.e. what kind of bugs or unsupported features am I likely to encounter when I play one vs the other?

aquova 3y ago
It varies quite a bit, and there are some items that are pretty minor that will cause a game to not be officially verified. For example, some of the 2D Final Fantasy games run very well without any issues on the Steam Deck, but are only listed as playable because they require the use of the on-screen keyboard to enter in character names.
madelyn 3y ago
It honestly varies by game, but in my experience "Playable" is usually a great to okay experience but has small text, a launcher you need to use a touch screen for, or maybe only partial controller support. Game breaking bugs are rare in playable titles from what I've seen. The majority of games I play on SD are "only" playable and it's still a great experience.
robrtsql 3y ago
The difference is not huge. The big one is that, to be "Verified", there are some usability criteria that need to be met (the game's text needs to be legible on the Steam Deck screen, you need to be able to launch the game without any hacky tweaks like clicking around in a launcher using the touch-screen or something, the game needs to basically work out-of-the-box with the Steam Deck's sticks and buttons, etc) and if those aren't met then they will provide a 'blurb' which explains which ones are missing. Other than that, I have found that lots of games which aren't "Verified" play perfectly, and some games which are "Verified" don't launch at all (because Valve said 'hey! it works!', gave it the Verified badge, and then a month later the developers pushed out an update for the game which broke something for Steam Deck users).
Derbasti 3y ago
Playable most of the time means "this game requires a keyboard, so remember to press Steam+X for the on-screen keyboard when you're asked to enter your character name", or "fonts are a bit small on the small screen", or "there's no built-in performance preset, so you'll have to set it to medium manually". Essentially, complete non-issues most of the time.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Proton is such a huge achievement. The SteamDeck isn't for me (don't care for mobile form factor). But this work also benefits me on a Chromebook using its experimental Steam support. It runs Steam and games in a container that works well with Proton.

parabyl 3y ago
Proton is really quite incredible as a compatibility layer, I've not seen any performance drops (if anything, only small performance gains, which I assume is due to fewer background processes in the OS), but most incredible is the frequency with which Proton is updated and worked on. I'd tried gaming on linux before and gave up after a week or two of configuration attempts. I had put it off for ages and tried with proton on a dual boot system earlier this year, and instantly had access to everything installed on windows. It also means I can actually recommend linux to people with older machines trying to squeeze a little extra out of their lifespan, without having to tell them it's an uphill battle to get gaming working as expected.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  The one very specific oddity depending on how old the system is, at make sure the GPU supports Vulkan. Yes, you can force it down to OpenGL but compatibility is low and buggy. Not the fault.of proton as they are just focusing on the path forward.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Some people say that a thing how Steam Deck performs good is thanks to shader cache. There's only one GPU(SoC) SKU for Steam Deck like normal gaming console, so shader cache can be precompiled for Steam games, unlike PC.
G3rn0ti 3y ago
The company that’s really behind Proton [1] sells „CrossOver“ as a commercial product to run Windows applications on MacOS, Linux and ChromeOS with enhanced compatibility compared to free Wine. IIRC they started out to selling „CrossOver Office“ running MS Office seamlessly on a Linux desktop. If you want to support their effort you could buy a license for under $100 and run many Windows titles and games w/o emulation or the Steam client. [1] https://www.codeweavers.com/ https://www.codeweavers.com/

elromulous 3y ago

This is the year of the Linux desktop! Somewhat tongue in cheek, but also not kidding. I realize the deck is not a desktop, but this is by far the most penetration Linux has had on something that is actually a consumer facing computer (vs an appliance).

AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
The Linux desktop is still a subpar experience compared to Windows 10+ or macOS - that said, it is definitely now a viable platform for "PC gamers" who want to move away from Windows for whatever reason - or eg. devs like me who use Linux to code and who may be tired of dual booting. That said for me if it works 95% of the time, I still prefer dual booting. I spent a few months trying Steam on Ubuntu and it was great - I was surprised just how transparent the experience was since Steam handles Proton/Wine etc for you. But after seeing limitations like Oculus software to do some Quest + LInk PC VR, or Steam VR etc. I was like, I 'm just going to keep Ubuntu as my daily OS to surf and code etc, and I will reboot into Windows for gaming. Then I dont have to worry about any of the small print. But I am hopeful. Those are great developments and within a few years we might see all the VR as well supported with no hassle in Linux. BUT... interestingly with the recent developments on macOS, and their own "proton like" API - the macOS platform may also become a viable one... who knows.. if it works with external GPUs for example. Exciting times for gaming!
kelvie 3y ago
This is probably not true due to Chromebooks running Linux.

ekianjo 3y ago

If you like this graph, there's a lot more here about the state of the Steam Deck right now: https://boilingsteam.com/valve-is-accelerating-the-validation-of-games-from-2023-for-the-steam-deck-like-never-before-including-games-not-even-released-yet/ https://boilingsteam.com/valve-is-accelerating-the-validatio...

lysecret 3y ago

I can only join the praise for the Steam Deck. For the launch of Diablo4 I bought a 3k gaming laptop which I returned because the Steam Deck was the superior experience for me.

devinprater 3y ago

This is really cool for Linux! Hopefully as people figure out the SteamDeck is a PC running Arch and KDE, the Steamdeck will become some folks' computer. Of course, the Steamdeck doesn't have a screen reader, so I'd have to put Windows on it, which kinda defeats the purpose, but I'm glad other people can enjoy a mainstream Linux machine.

dimgl 3y ago

I'm currently using a Steam Deck to play through Diablo IV and it's absolutely amazing how well Diablo IV runs. Once you get it working, it works great. That being said it did take me an unbelievable amount of tinkering to get it to work. And unfortunately SteamOS comes with all of the typical bugginess you would expect from a Linux OS baked into a handheld device (keyboard disappears, trackpads stop working randomly, UI elements overlap with no way of removing them, etc.) Still, the Steam Deck is a freaking achievement. The battery life is unbelievably good for a device of this kind. If a new Steam Deck comes out with an OLED screen it's a day 1 purchase for me.

belmarca 3y ago
Maybe you didn't know what you were doing? There are some tutorials to follow online which makes it easy. For non-SD users reading this: you can get D4 running in about the time it takes to download Battle.net and the game itself. You basically install Battle.net on the deck, and then create a launcher from within Steam. That's it.
- CardenB 3y ago
  I’m pretty sure you have to install the launcher through wine and then install it. Then you have to configure the right capability layer through the steam launcher IIRC
  - belmarca 3y ago
    I did everything from within Steam. Set up the installer as a Steam app, then set up the BNet launcher as a steam app, and done. It took a few minutes, basically waiting for the installation and download.
- dimgl 3y ago
  > Maybe you didn't know what you were doing? Okay, I'm on Hacker News, what are the odds I don't know what I'm doing? You don't "just install" Diablo IV on the Deck. You have to add the Battle.net Setup binary as a non-Steam app, or go through Lutris. I chose to not use Lutris and instead go through Steam which requires you to go to desktop mode, install it, and then change the paths from the setup binary to the Battle.net Launcher binary, which means going through the file system to look for it, and the paths could differ depending on whether you installed it on an SD card or the SSD. Apologies for being defensive. I want to make sure people who read this thread take the positive reception with a grain of salt. I had to do all of this as a brand new Steam Deck user. All of this was made more complicated by a couple of UI bugs in the Steam UI and the fact that desktop mode has a bug where the keyboards and trackpads stop working randomly unless Steam big picture is enabled. I had to discover all of this through Google searches. A couple more problems: one of the tutorials online forgot to mention you have to change the launch directory as well. That was about an hour wasted trying to figure out why Battle.net was not launching. Additionally, you can't download games with the screen off. That's because pressing the power button behaves like a computer, in that it makes the entire OS go to sleep. You have to literally keep your Steam Deck on in order for it to download the game.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

I game on linux so that's good for me I wish Steam Deck wasn't this poorly designed, I'd have bought one Hopefully their 2nd gen will look better, smaller and with a better battery Unless they release a 2nd gen of this baby: https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4 https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4

mateo- 3y ago
what's wrong with the design? That link looks sketchy, btw.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  Too big, weird button placement, and I'm not a fan of the overall aesthetic > That link looks sketchy, btw. Yeah, it kinda is weird, but that's your typical Chinese website.. lol GPD is the company that pioneered the handheld gaming PC form factor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbFPXLB7GI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbFPXLB7GI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K9ByWPqYtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K9ByWPqYtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjrbHFv_dA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjrbHFv_dA And this one, 6 years ago already! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lslcH-T1E0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lslcH-T1E0o Makes you realize Microsoft could have owned the handheld market if they weren't this incompetent https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1648385366033076224 https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/164838536603307622...
  - mateo- 3y ago
    Yea, I getcha. I wonder how much repair-ability limited the design. Chunkier components is probably much easier for the common person to repair. I wouldn't want to open up my iPhone or Switch as an example, but feel like I'd be super comfortable taking apart the Deck.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  And you got downvoted for asking me a question Something fishy going on

htk 3y ago

The Steam Deck makes my daily ride on the stationary bike a very fun activity.

gotlou 3y ago

This is amazing news, and I've found that thanks to Proton patches being upstreamed by Valve and CodeWeavers, not to mention the Wine community, that games that run on Proton tend to run using vanilla Wine as well, thus improving compatibility for Wine in general!

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

Proton is god-tier. I can open pretty much any game and it just runs. You aren't stuck in Windows anymore.

zhynn 3y ago
I have yet to not be able to run a game. I have had a couple that didn't launch, but when I configured them to use Proton Experimenal, they started right up. This includes demos for new games that are not at all intended to be run on a deck. I have been so impressed.

irusensei 3y ago

Sometimes I find the Proton version of a game working better than native. For example Pathfinder Kingmaker which has some kind of interface bug that makes it difficulty to progress after a certain point because the kingdom management interface doesn’t work correctly. Loaded proton version, no bug and the performance is waaaaay better. Smooth gameplay. I’m guessing here that native games are often linked to some SDL version or something similar and might not work well with a considerable newer system.

porcc 3y ago
https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-plays-elden-ring-better-than-a-dollar5000-pc-thanks-to-valve https://www.techradar.com/news/steam-deck-plays-elden-ring-b...

SubiculumCode 3y ago

Now do Office, and I'd say goodbye.

miga 3y ago

If more and more games are tested and verified on Steam Deck, why less and less games are playable under most recent version of Ubuntu? Since I upgraded to 23.04, most of Paradox and many others refuse to play. Is it something that Ubuntu broke, or a different Linux kernel that breaks OpenGL?

shaggie76 3y ago

It's an impressive technical achievement, no question, but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE). So I wonder about the metric for "playable" -- is a 4x greater chance of crashing when using your Steam Deck vs your PC still "playable"? And I wonder if players, who can't tell if a crash is related to emulation or a bug in the game, will blame the game developer when it isn't really fair to hold them accountable.

Uvix 3y ago
Depends on how much it's crashing in the first place. The difference between a 1/2500 event and a 1/10000 event is probably not going to be noticed, but the difference between a 1/2 and a 1/8 event probably is.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> but we're bedeviled by elusive crashes that seem to be exposed by some nuance of the Proton (WINE) emulation layer (at least 2% of our game crashes and at least 25% of our launcher crashes which is disproportionate given that only half a percent of our players are using some version of WINE). Do Windows games work on Linux? No, there's little Valve can do to change that, bless their hearts. But it's a very Reddit Social Media friendly statistic. It doesn't square with the reality from people like you, who actually make games with an audience. And anyway, if you want to build for Linux, use Unity, so Proton is kind of a moot point, and also, you'll be doing that to sell on Switch anyway, porting your game like Vampire Survivor, Slay the Spire, etc. did, if you care about that audience. Vulkan will be fully deprecated before Proton can substantively reimplement enough Windows for non-middleware games. And anyway, Vulkan is awful, it's poorly supported by all the vendors, including Valve's own, but again, it doesn't matter. The bigger picture: Steam already sells so many copies of games to so many people who spend 0 minutes playing those games. The idea of playing a game is enough to sell it. So in a sense, does it matter if your game doesn't work for the people who bought it? Like in the sense of objective reality? RGB? People buy that stuff. It wouldn't be on everything if it didn't sell. The Steam Deck is a cozy idea of gaming people like to buy. They could also blow $300 on a video card overpowered for playing Overwatch and League. These trends don't make sense in an objective reality, but the product is already psychological for so many people. Brad Wardell, pariah and guy who was, ultimately, totally utterly right, figured this out ages ago: > You focus on people who buy your stuff... One of the jokes... is how "ugly" WindowBlinds skins are (though there are plenty of awesome ones too). But the thing is, the people who buy WindowBlinds tend to like a different style of skin than the people who would never buy it in the first place.(https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/303512/piracy-pc-gaming https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/303512/piracy-pc-gamin... 2008) And anyway, who cares? At the end of the day, you go and buy Windows on your handheld. Would people spend $15 on an OEM license of Windows for the Deck to have their games not have this problem? Probably. It is good for the planet that Valve is trying to make WINE emulation work, but it's not doing anything for the consumer - Unity is, middlewares are - and it's not doing anything for the game developer - more games would sell if it was just Windows - so really, pass your judgement in an objective reality. I really don't see the point of DXVK.

metaphor 3y ago

I suspect the metrics are actually better than reported. For example, Skul: The Hero Slayer[1][2] is a relatively popular indie game whose Steam Deck compatibility is officially "Unsupported" because "graphics settings cannot be configured to run well", but if you ignored the warning and installed it anyways, you'd be scratching your head in confusion trying to find anything broken compared to PC. Imagining NEOWIZ/SouthPAW Games is liable to have lost quite a bit of revenue because of this seemingly incorrect compatibility listing alone. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147560/Skul_The_Hero_Slayer/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147560/Skul_The_Hero_Sla... [2] https://steamdb.info/app/1147560/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/1147560/charts/

snowpalmer 3y ago
I have the same experience. Skul works great on the Deck. I initially didn't even try it until I saw a comment from someone telling me it works. The "Unsupported" tag is intimidating. Now I'll test out even the Unsupported ones.

darthrupert 3y ago

In year 2021, it was more a rule than exception that a Windows game would not work on Steam. In year 2022, it switched. I haven't found a Windows game that doesn't work on Steam. And amusingly, I have found a few Windows games that don't work on Windows.

rldjbpin 3y ago

a massive asterix for the title - the 75% is out of the 10k or so games tested by Valve thus far. as someone who's been trying to run games on linux for almost a decade, we are still a long way away from being able to just launch games on steam (in linux or with steam deck) without thinking twice. despite the progress in emulating windows code in linux, you need devs to step in for weird cases such as anticheat or another layer of DRM companies like Ubisoft and EA put on their titles. given steam deck's success tho, i am hopeful to see some effort from developers to make it more accessible to just launch a game on deck and have a good experience. even if it might be down to just supporting less powerful hardware. it might also be a blessing to only have a limited subset of titles given how vast steam catalog is. my library is already too big to catch up on.

themoonisachees 3y ago

The actual percentage is higher. Steam has a lot of games they mark as unplayable that are very much playable with only a few tweaks, but since they don't just work right when you press play they say it's unplayable. ProtonDB is better, though it does move slowly. Basically if protonDB says it isn't borked, the game will run.

mikhael28 3y ago

lol I game on my 2019 MacBook Pro 16'. If you run Arch on it, you can use Steam Proton - or use Bootcamp with it. You will need a fan, but it works really well - you can run the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk (albeit not at 60fps) and many, many games very well. Steam Deck is another piece of hardware, you can get away with using a lot less.