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The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

305 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement? Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck. (Not really a gamer, despite having written games, ha ha, but I picked up a Steam Deck a couple years ago to test a game I ported to it — and was duly impressed.)
- butlike 2y ago
  A licensing deal between Nintendo and Valve. Once could dream. Get the entire Steam lib on your Switch, then Valve gets a "Zelda: Breath of the Wild 3 - Only on Nintendo" store listing on Steam.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It's sticker price shock for sure. Historically speaking, this will just smooth over and people will set their sticks in the sand. If the 900 dollar PS5 pro can shrug it off, then I doubt there's much issue here.
- jagermo 2y ago
  For me, the switch is the only console I trust to leave my kids alone with. Nintendo builds great games for kids, but you pay for them. I mean, launch games like Mario Odysee and Breath of the Wild are still sold at full price, years later.
  - garrettjoecox 2y ago
    I have kids, and have had a Nintendo switch since launch. I cannot even let them play Mario kart alone without them being prompted to visit the store to buy levels or more characters. My 4 year old cannot go a few minutes without ending up back on the home screen, stuck in the settings menus or in the controller reconfiguration menu, asking me to get them back into the game (because they pressed the Home button) Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid" Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
- pie_flavor 2y ago
  > Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck. If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk footage is authentic. Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable mouse. This will actually be a better experience than the Deck (assuming the mouse doesn't hurt your hand). The Deck has best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, but if the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is just a mouse.
- agnishom 2y ago
  > I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement? Author here. Not really, it was a coincidence. I wrote this post around 8 months ago, and posted it on HN before but people didn't notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392
whytevuhuni 2y ago
They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of, but... I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.
- dagurp 2y ago
  By the low standards set by other companies in similar positions I think they're doing quite well.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  I hope Gabe Newell outlives me, because I don't want to see Valve go down the road of other game studios...
  - Brybry 2y ago
    My main long term worry with Steam is that Gaben will die and then Valve will IPO.
    - tjpnz 2y ago
      The spectre of a post-IPO Half Life 3 is something which fills me with dread.
  - butlike 2y ago
    [flagged]
- ziddoap 2y ago
  How do you qualify them as a monopoly? I have 3 different non-Steam game stores and another 3 or 4 non-Steam game-specific launchers on my PC.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    >How do you qualify them as a monopoly? If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam. Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.
maelito 2y ago
If only there was a powerful linux phone with convergence. The steam deck is not far from that.
glenstein 2y ago
It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS. It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure. And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016. I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    There are rumors about an Xbox handheld https://www.pcworld.com/article/2656008/leak-more-evidence-of-an-xbox-handheld-found-in-windows-11-preview.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2656008/leak-more-evidence-o...
  - randmeerkat 2y ago
    > The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld. Or they’d realize that the Deck is successful because it’s open and bring Steam to the Xbox.
    - 2y ago
paxys 2y ago
Does that mean it can run Steam games offline and DRM-free?
- INTPenis 2y ago
  You can run steam games offline on a regular PC. But I think you're trying to make a point about Steam DRM. Someone once said; there are two DRMs that everyone loves, Apple and Steam. And I have to say it's true. I am normally not a proponent of DRM, I've been pirating since TURBO 250 tapes on c64, but I do love Steam. I love it for what Gabe has done for us gamers on Linux. In my opinion he deserves 30%.
  - TehCorwiz 2y ago
    Neither of those DRMs have ever prevented me, the owner, from using my content. Ubisoft once locked me out of some Star Wars game while I was trying to install it because it kept crashing during the install and consumed all of the "licenses". I returned the game.
  - butlike 2y ago
    It's not about the 30%, it's about giving you the ball for $3.30 then taking the ball away sometime later saying you can no longer play with it and no, there won't be any refunds.
    - INTPenis 2y ago
      Playing devil's advocate here but I've had a Steam account for well over 15 years now and my library of games has only grown. I am sure there are stories and certain situations where people have lost access to games, but I think they're fringe cases.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        And they are fringe cases with most DRM, since most of any of my libraries still exist if I check it. But people seem so Gung ho about DRM being bad. except for Steam.
danso 2y ago
Sounds like the Switch 2 might be a bit more powerful and similarly priced to the 3-year-old Deck. But even if Switch’s hardware feature set was substantially better, Steam’s much cheaper (and more expansive) library is still the killer feature. I don’t think the Switch 1’s Zelda launch title has ever been discounted lower than $40 despite being 8 years old. On Steam, virtually every top title will be 50% within 2 years, if not 1.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda. Even with a steam deck, I am probably going to get the Switch2, mostly because I can lower my head on in-game profiteering, which is increasingly prevalent on steam games.
  - jerf 2y ago
    I would agree that the Switch's really big feature at this point is that it is where Nintendo games appear, and in that family-friendly-but-still-high-quality niche they are still worth chasing if you want them. I don't know how you get from there to "games on steam are sub par quality" because at this point, everything else is on Steam, so calling the rest of the Steam library "sub par" is effectively calling the entire rest of the industry, from top to bottom, "sub par", and I'd have a hard time with that one. Nintendo has a pretty good track record but they're just one company. And not because I love AAA, I'm pretty much out of the AAA loop entirely at this point, but because it's literally everything else. In particular, the XBox exclusive and PS exclusives are, if not dead, on life support. PS may still have a sort of "Japanese game that doesn't appear on Steam" niche, but even that's getting eaten into; every major Atlus release lately is showing up on Steam as a first-class citizen, for instance.
    - keyringlight 2y ago
      As far as quality goes, the main things steam looks for [0] to release is that it launches on the platforms you say it's available for, and that it matches the store page you've made for it. Presumably it'd have to be absolutely malicious for them to get involved past that [0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/review_process https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/review_process
paradite 2y ago
I might be missing the point of the author, but what's the difference between Steam Deck and a normal Windows gaming laptop in terms of software freedom? Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2). I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.
- TehCorwiz 2y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of "Software freedom". It refers more to the process and transparency of the software than to the choice. That said, the Steam Deck is just a handheld PC. And Valve gives instructions on how to install Windows on it should you want to do that. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BAA8 https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BA... Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-source development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).
  - jerf 2y ago
    I'd also call out that Valve is probably running the biggest managed Linux install base in the world now. They manage the OS and update it. If you really want to get in there and root the thing, you can; you can install other OSes including Windows if you want, it's open, it just defaults to managed. And they made sure to integrate Flatpaks into their base OS image and the default image ships with the Flatpak market/browser, because Flatpaks can be easily installed and managed without conflicting with the base OS that they are managing... and it works. It really works. Even out of the box and without penetrating their management, you have a lot of freedom, and the fences are just advisory. I'm sure they're not interested in it but they've got a decent solution for someone to start selling managed Linux desktops and laptops for end-users if they wanted to.
TehCorwiz 2y ago
No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you expect them to in other apps, back buttons work. You can pop open multiple windows. It gets out of your way. You can even set your kids accounts to not have access to the store, something that literally no other company does. I'd love to disable the Minecraft Marketplace for my kids because sometimes they spend more time looking at things there than playing. GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app! Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers. EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
- sylens 2y ago
  > I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
brainzap 2y ago
steamdeck verified is a lie, I bought a steamdeck and tested 20 games. Lots of problems.
- outcoldman 2y ago
  What kills Deck for me are the game launchers.
  - have_faith 2y ago
    For me it was the lack of portability (it's a chunky beast), I just wasn't taking it anywhere because it takes up so much space in your bag. By comparison the switch with it's disconnecting controllers fits in my electronics bag along with a bunch of plugs, chargers and cables and hardly takes up any room, and weighs a decent amount less. Looking forward to a slimmer and narrower V2 though, if it ever materialises.
    - keyringlight 2y ago
      My feeling is that deck v2 will only happen around the time of next generation consoles (PS6, etc) so they can piggy-back off the AMD APU made for it again. Getting a chip as a slight variation on a mass-market product is going to be a lot easier
- Etheryte 2y ago
  I don't own one, so mostly just curious, what are some more prominent examples of this?
  - groovybits 2y ago
    Steam Deck owner since launch here -- I wouldn't say the Verified status is a lie, but there have been instances where games have received Verified badge status at launch, but performed poorly on Deck. Some popular examples of this; 1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck. 2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game. Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings? Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user. I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved. 1: https://www.steamdeck.com/verified https://www.steamdeck.com/verified
accurrent 2y ago
I love the deck. Its shown us how opensource can be used for a commercial product (and how consumer products dont have to be locked down). I use it in desktop mode every now and then (work in robotics so it makes one hell of an awesome robot controller). I really wish more manufacturers followed suite rather than bundle the crapware that is windows.
LightHugger 2y ago
> Some people have criticized that their company culture of libertarianism sometimes takes precedence over other important values including equity and inclusion. To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some misguided quotas.
- michaelsshaw 2y ago
  It's crazy that, according to people like you, we've always been doing merit-based hiring and still the computer workforce is disproportionately white and male. Nothing fishy there at all.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Tbf if your graduating class is 89% male, and your declared tech majors are 80% male, the issue isn't necessarily on the workforce. It's clear we need to start much earlier in exposing tech to potential other audiences. But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
    - TehCorwiz 2y ago
      There are factors that affect the education pipeline as well. Representation can make it appear as if some groups aren't welcome. Read about the Scully effect to see how simple representation (in fiction no less!) changed the number of women who grew up watching the X-Files who chose a field of science. Harassment during education has caused candidates to change majors. I've seen this one happen IRL to a friend. She ended up pursuing her software dev career independently of a college degree because the environment was so toxic. The problem isn't just hiring, but helping hiring will help with the other two by addressing those cultural problems.
  - smotched 2y ago
cheeseomlit 2y ago
If only gaben could live forever... It'll be a dark day for gaming when he's gone and valve gets bought out by MS or goes public.
- DaedPsyker 2y ago
  It will be. The best case might be valve turns into some form of co-op, it might keep some of that culture going.
jerf 2y ago
I have a first-gen Switch, still in active rotation. My kids are asking me why we don't hack it. My answer has been, what does a hacked Switch do that my Steam Deck doesn't already do, without hacking? I mean, if you're going to sail the seven seas and yo-ho-ho, not that I've been encouraging that, the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too! And at least we can't accidentally hook the Switch up to the network and get it banned if it isn't hacked.
- butlike 2y ago
  Could be a fun family project to hack the Switch
- haunter 2y ago
  >the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too What about motion control games like Switch Sports?
  - jerf 2y ago
    I don't have any personal experience running Switch games on the Steam Deck, but I do have experience trying to use the Switch Pro controllers. I think they may work fine for some people now, but I have never been able to have them have a stable wireless connection. But when the connection was established, the accelerometers worked fine. (I gave up and just bought some XBox controllers.) I'm sure the emulators accept the Steam Deck's own accelerometer inputs for when you're in a non-detached mode, and tilting the screen to aim. The super-mega-motion control games might not work, but part of what I mean by "works better" is that the Steam Deck can generally emulate with more power than the Switch itself, e.g., you can get a Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom setup with a better framerate than the switch itself, so, depends on what you want more. I don't have a lot of motion control games.
    - ferbivore 2y ago
      Is this really the case? Every video I've seen about Switch emulation on the Deck shows stutter, low framerates, audio glitches, etc. in most games. For ToTK in particular, this video suggests it'll barely hit ~30FPS on the Deck under Yuzu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afetsBdQFyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afetsBdQFyc Whereas on a modded Switch you can run it at ~60FPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Z6W_AUNY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Z6W_AUNY0 There are other more recent videos backing this up and showing that the game has far more frequent stutters than on the Switch. Anyway, the point is, I wouldn't dismiss sticking a picofly into your Switch as pointless. Even if you have no desire to inflict some Meta-style "fair use" on videogame publishers, it's still worth doing for perks like sys-clk, RetroArch, sm64nx and 2s2h.
pabs3 2y ago
Hmm, the headline here is quite different to the post.
craftkiller 2y ago
I purchased a steam deck when they first came out specifically to financially support Valve's Linux efforts and I haven't regretted that purchase for a second. In the past year I had a couple of days where my laptop was not working. I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened (after installing some software of course, like emacs). I've re-purchased games that I own on consoles just to get the PC versions to de-couple my games from hardware, so now I'll be able to run Flower on powerful beasts, portable handhelds, and computers that haven't been invented yet whereas before it was stuck on a loud aging ps3. My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games. I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing machine just to be able to run their software when I already have a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead to more e-waste and wasted closet space. Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed adult, I want to give you money for your games. Release your games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with more e-waste.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened Same here, I already had a keyboard and mouse plugged into it and it served excellently until the replacement part for my daily driver arrived.
- AlwaysRock 2y ago
  You know this already but the reason nintendo doesnt release their games on other systems is so you have to buy the system. I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo device if they released their games on other system. So they likely never will. It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or android.
  - tormeh 2y ago
    You also probably know this, but they don't really care about the console per se. What you buying the console means is that Nintendo gets to stand on the bridge between your console and game developers and demand 30% or whatever it is. Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.
deleted 2y ago
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thih9 2y ago
How good is platform support - can I install e.g. Diablo 3 and have the thumbsticks control the character and not a virtual mouse? Or would I need to remap the input myself?
- WolfeReader 2y ago
  It varies by game - if the devs created a default control scheme, the Deck will load that by default and you're good to go. (The green check mark means that Valve verified this behavior, as well as other things.) And if not, the Deck UI makes it pretty easy to create your own mappings and share them, or download "community layouts". You don't need a Deck to try it - you can run Steam in "big picture mode" on any computer, with a controller, and get the same UI which the Deck uses.
  - thih9 2y ago
    I was going to check that and I realized i can’t find diablo 3 on steam. I know I could install it myself through some other online store. Still, I wish there were cartridges that “just worked”; consoles (including today’s Nintendo) got that part right IMO.
- tomnipotent 2y ago
  Steam's Input system is great, and many people will launch non-Steam games through Steam specifically for the controller mapping. Any game with controller support (console) works flawlessly with the Deck, or any PC using a controller. I don't think I've come across a game that doesn't work out of the box.
GardenLetter27 2y ago
It's one of the best devices I've ever bought. I've used it for all sorts of stuff from gaming on flights, to local multiplayer, to controlling a robot car, to watching YouTube with adblocking, etc.
vinceguidry 2y ago
> According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way. Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.
seba_dos1 2y ago
That's an editorialized title ("The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly") and subtly different than what the article actually states. I don't think Steam Deck was made particularly software-freedom friendly. I do think that it managed to not be software-freedom unfriendly, and that's because unlike other vendors Valve did not care to make it so. It's a subtle, yet non-negligible difference that leads to different outcomes.
dezzadk 2y ago
> The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know. First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys. Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other. Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades. Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever. Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine. Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing. My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really.. Native Linux ports matters!
- deleted 2y ago
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- bigyabai 2y ago
  > the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK, without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux at all. It's not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed. There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance. > Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update. > to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.
Fwirt 2y ago
The selling point of a Steam Deck is that it is a PC console. One of the problems with the PC gaming market is that even though in theory all PCs are "compatible", the reality for game developers is very different. Different PCs have subtly (or not so subtly) incompatible software and hardware, and it's up to OS developers to try to maintain some semblance of compatibility, and game developers to ensure that their product runs on as many configurations as possible. The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense. The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success. People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
benoror 2y ago
> I had no issues installing Epic Games Except Fortnite =(
skeptrune 2y ago
I don't think a product being freedom friendly is going to make it a success in and of itself, but seeing one always makes me smile and that's a win in my book.
preisschild 2y ago
> You can’t run arbitrary programs of your choice on an Android phone without rooting, or on an iPad or an iPhone without jailbreaking. Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)
pjmlp 2y ago
> Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux. This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.
Mr_Eri_Atlov 2y ago
The steam deck is so cool, I can't wait for the steam box revolution to begin

305 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement? Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck. (Not really a gamer, despite having written games, ha ha, but I picked up a Steam Deck a couple years ago to test a game I ported to it — and was duly impressed.)

butlike 2y ago
A licensing deal between Nintendo and Valve. Once could dream. Get the entire Steam lib on your Switch, then Valve gets a "Zelda: Breath of the Wild 3 - Only on Nintendo" store listing on Steam.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
It's sticker price shock for sure. Historically speaking, this will just smooth over and people will set their sticks in the sand. If the 900 dollar PS5 pro can shrug it off, then I doubt there's much issue here.
jagermo 2y ago
For me, the switch is the only console I trust to leave my kids alone with. Nintendo builds great games for kids, but you pay for them. I mean, launch games like Mario Odysee and Breath of the Wild are still sold at full price, years later.
- garrettjoecox 2y ago
  I have kids, and have had a Nintendo switch since launch. I cannot even let them play Mario kart alone without them being prompted to visit the store to buy levels or more characters. My 4 year old cannot go a few minutes without ending up back on the home screen, stuck in the settings menus or in the controller reconfiguration menu, asking me to get them back into the game (because they pressed the Home button) Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid" Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
pie_flavor 2y ago
> Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck. If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk footage is authentic. Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable mouse. This will actually be a better experience than the Deck (assuming the mouse doesn't hurt your hand). The Deck has best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, but if the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is just a mouse.
agnishom 2y ago
> I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement? Author here. Not really, it was a coincidence. I wrote this post around 8 months ago, and posted it on HN before but people didn't notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392

whytevuhuni 2y ago

They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of, but... I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.

dagurp 2y ago
By the low standards set by other companies in similar positions I think they're doing quite well.
phoronixrly 2y ago
I hope Gabe Newell outlives me, because I don't want to see Valve go down the road of other game studios...
- Brybry 2y ago
  My main long term worry with Steam is that Gaben will die and then Valve will IPO.
  - tjpnz 2y ago
    The spectre of a post-IPO Half Life 3 is something which fills me with dread.
- butlike 2y ago
  [flagged]
ziddoap 2y ago
How do you qualify them as a monopoly? I have 3 different non-Steam game stores and another 3 or 4 non-Steam game-specific launchers on my PC.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >How do you qualify them as a monopoly? If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam. Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.

maelito 2y ago

If only there was a powerful linux phone with convergence. The steam deck is not far from that.

glenstein 2y ago

It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS. It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure. And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016. I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.

PaulHoule 2y ago
The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  There are rumors about an Xbox handheld https://www.pcworld.com/article/2656008/leak-more-evidence-of-an-xbox-handheld-found-in-windows-11-preview.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2656008/leak-more-evidence-o...
- randmeerkat 2y ago
  > The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld. Or they’d realize that the Deck is successful because it’s open and bring Steam to the Xbox.
  - 2y ago

paxys 2y ago

Does that mean it can run Steam games offline and DRM-free?

INTPenis 2y ago
You can run steam games offline on a regular PC. But I think you're trying to make a point about Steam DRM. Someone once said; there are two DRMs that everyone loves, Apple and Steam. And I have to say it's true. I am normally not a proponent of DRM, I've been pirating since TURBO 250 tapes on c64, but I do love Steam. I love it for what Gabe has done for us gamers on Linux. In my opinion he deserves 30%.
- TehCorwiz 2y ago
  Neither of those DRMs have ever prevented me, the owner, from using my content. Ubisoft once locked me out of some Star Wars game while I was trying to install it because it kept crashing during the install and consumed all of the "licenses". I returned the game.
- butlike 2y ago
  It's not about the 30%, it's about giving you the ball for $3.30 then taking the ball away sometime later saying you can no longer play with it and no, there won't be any refunds.
  - INTPenis 2y ago
    Playing devil's advocate here but I've had a Steam account for well over 15 years now and my library of games has only grown. I am sure there are stories and certain situations where people have lost access to games, but I think they're fringe cases.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      And they are fringe cases with most DRM, since most of any of my libraries still exist if I check it. But people seem so Gung ho about DRM being bad. except for Steam.

danso 2y ago

Sounds like the Switch 2 might be a bit more powerful and similarly priced to the 3-year-old Deck. But even if Switch’s hardware feature set was substantially better, Steam’s much cheaper (and more expansive) library is still the killer feature. I don’t think the Switch 1’s Zelda launch title has ever been discounted lower than $40 despite being 8 years old. On Steam, virtually every top title will be 50% within 2 years, if not 1.

tossandthrow 2y ago
My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda. Even with a steam deck, I am probably going to get the Switch2, mostly because I can lower my head on in-game profiteering, which is increasingly prevalent on steam games.
- jerf 2y ago
  I would agree that the Switch's really big feature at this point is that it is where Nintendo games appear, and in that family-friendly-but-still-high-quality niche they are still worth chasing if you want them. I don't know how you get from there to "games on steam are sub par quality" because at this point, everything else is on Steam, so calling the rest of the Steam library "sub par" is effectively calling the entire rest of the industry, from top to bottom, "sub par", and I'd have a hard time with that one. Nintendo has a pretty good track record but they're just one company. And not because I love AAA, I'm pretty much out of the AAA loop entirely at this point, but because it's literally everything else. In particular, the XBox exclusive and PS exclusives are, if not dead, on life support. PS may still have a sort of "Japanese game that doesn't appear on Steam" niche, but even that's getting eaten into; every major Atlus release lately is showing up on Steam as a first-class citizen, for instance.
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    As far as quality goes, the main things steam looks for [0] to release is that it launches on the platforms you say it's available for, and that it matches the store page you've made for it. Presumably it'd have to be absolutely malicious for them to get involved past that [0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/review_process https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/review_process

paradite 2y ago

I might be missing the point of the author, but what's the difference between Steam Deck and a normal Windows gaming laptop in terms of software freedom? Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2). I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.

TehCorwiz 2y ago
I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of "Software freedom". It refers more to the process and transparency of the software than to the choice. That said, the Steam Deck is just a handheld PC. And Valve gives instructions on how to install Windows on it should you want to do that. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BAA8 https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BA... Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-source development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/ https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).
- jerf 2y ago
  I'd also call out that Valve is probably running the biggest managed Linux install base in the world now. They manage the OS and update it. If you really want to get in there and root the thing, you can; you can install other OSes including Windows if you want, it's open, it just defaults to managed. And they made sure to integrate Flatpaks into their base OS image and the default image ships with the Flatpak market/browser, because Flatpaks can be easily installed and managed without conflicting with the base OS that they are managing... and it works. It really works. Even out of the box and without penetrating their management, you have a lot of freedom, and the fences are just advisory. I'm sure they're not interested in it but they've got a decent solution for someone to start selling managed Linux desktops and laptops for end-users if they wanted to.

TehCorwiz 2y ago

No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you expect them to in other apps, back buttons work. You can pop open multiple windows. It gets out of your way. You can even set your kids accounts to not have access to the store, something that literally no other company does. I'd love to disable the Minecraft Marketplace for my kids because sometimes they spend more time looking at things there than playing. GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app! Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers. EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share

sylens 2y ago
> I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago

brainzap 2y ago

steamdeck verified is a lie, I bought a steamdeck and tested 20 games. Lots of problems.

outcoldman 2y ago
What kills Deck for me are the game launchers.
- have_faith 2y ago
  For me it was the lack of portability (it's a chunky beast), I just wasn't taking it anywhere because it takes up so much space in your bag. By comparison the switch with it's disconnecting controllers fits in my electronics bag along with a bunch of plugs, chargers and cables and hardly takes up any room, and weighs a decent amount less. Looking forward to a slimmer and narrower V2 though, if it ever materialises.
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    My feeling is that deck v2 will only happen around the time of next generation consoles (PS6, etc) so they can piggy-back off the AMD APU made for it again. Getting a chip as a slight variation on a mass-market product is going to be a lot easier
Etheryte 2y ago
I don't own one, so mostly just curious, what are some more prominent examples of this?
- groovybits 2y ago
  Steam Deck owner since launch here -- I wouldn't say the Verified status is a lie, but there have been instances where games have received Verified badge status at launch, but performed poorly on Deck. Some popular examples of this; 1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck. 2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game. Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings? Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user. I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved. 1: https://www.steamdeck.com/verified https://www.steamdeck.com/verified

accurrent 2y ago

I love the deck. Its shown us how opensource can be used for a commercial product (and how consumer products dont have to be locked down). I use it in desktop mode every now and then (work in robotics so it makes one hell of an awesome robot controller). I really wish more manufacturers followed suite rather than bundle the crapware that is windows.

LightHugger 2y ago

> Some people have criticized that their company culture of libertarianism sometimes takes precedence over other important values including equity and inclusion. To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some misguided quotas.

michaelsshaw 2y ago
It's crazy that, according to people like you, we've always been doing merit-based hiring and still the computer workforce is disproportionately white and male. Nothing fishy there at all.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Tbf if your graduating class is 89% male, and your declared tech majors are 80% male, the issue isn't necessarily on the workforce. It's clear we need to start much earlier in exposing tech to potential other audiences. But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
  - TehCorwiz 2y ago
    There are factors that affect the education pipeline as well. Representation can make it appear as if some groups aren't welcome. Read about the Scully effect to see how simple representation (in fiction no less!) changed the number of women who grew up watching the X-Files who chose a field of science. Harassment during education has caused candidates to change majors. I've seen this one happen IRL to a friend. She ended up pursuing her software dev career independently of a college degree because the environment was so toxic. The problem isn't just hiring, but helping hiring will help with the other two by addressing those cultural problems.
- smotched 2y ago

cheeseomlit 2y ago

If only gaben could live forever... It'll be a dark day for gaming when he's gone and valve gets bought out by MS or goes public.

DaedPsyker 2y ago
It will be. The best case might be valve turns into some form of co-op, it might keep some of that culture going.

jerf 2y ago

I have a first-gen Switch, still in active rotation. My kids are asking me why we don't hack it. My answer has been, what does a hacked Switch do that my Steam Deck doesn't already do, without hacking? I mean, if you're going to sail the seven seas and yo-ho-ho, not that I've been encouraging that, the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too! And at least we can't accidentally hook the Switch up to the network and get it banned if it isn't hacked.

butlike 2y ago
Could be a fun family project to hack the Switch
haunter 2y ago
>the answer isn't even "Play Switch 1 games", the Steam Deck does that better too What about motion control games like Switch Sports?
- jerf 2y ago
  I don't have any personal experience running Switch games on the Steam Deck, but I do have experience trying to use the Switch Pro controllers. I think they may work fine for some people now, but I have never been able to have them have a stable wireless connection. But when the connection was established, the accelerometers worked fine. (I gave up and just bought some XBox controllers.) I'm sure the emulators accept the Steam Deck's own accelerometer inputs for when you're in a non-detached mode, and tilting the screen to aim. The super-mega-motion control games might not work, but part of what I mean by "works better" is that the Steam Deck can generally emulate with more power than the Switch itself, e.g., you can get a Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom setup with a better framerate than the switch itself, so, depends on what you want more. I don't have a lot of motion control games.
  - ferbivore 2y ago
    Is this really the case? Every video I've seen about Switch emulation on the Deck shows stutter, low framerates, audio glitches, etc. in most games. For ToTK in particular, this video suggests it'll barely hit ~30FPS on the Deck under Yuzu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afetsBdQFyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afetsBdQFyc Whereas on a modded Switch you can run it at ~60FPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Z6W_AUNY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Z6W_AUNY0 There are other more recent videos backing this up and showing that the game has far more frequent stutters than on the Switch. Anyway, the point is, I wouldn't dismiss sticking a picofly into your Switch as pointless. Even if you have no desire to inflict some Meta-style "fair use" on videogame publishers, it's still worth doing for perks like sys-clk, RetroArch, sm64nx and 2s2h.

pabs3 2y ago

Hmm, the headline here is quite different to the post.

craftkiller 2y ago

I purchased a steam deck when they first came out specifically to financially support Valve's Linux efforts and I haven't regretted that purchase for a second. In the past year I had a couple of days where my laptop was not working. I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened (after installing some software of course, like emacs). I've re-purchased games that I own on consoles just to get the PC versions to de-couple my games from hardware, so now I'll be able to run Flower on powerful beasts, portable handhelds, and computers that haven't been invented yet whereas before it was stuck on a loud aging ps3. My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games. I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing machine just to be able to run their software when I already have a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead to more e-waste and wasted closet space. Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed adult, I want to give you money for your games. Release your games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with more e-waste.

kibwen 2y ago
> I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened Same here, I already had a keyboard and mouse plugged into it and it served excellently until the replacement part for my daily driver arrived.
AlwaysRock 2y ago
You know this already but the reason nintendo doesnt release their games on other systems is so you have to buy the system. I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo device if they released their games on other system. So they likely never will. It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or android.
- tormeh 2y ago
  You also probably know this, but they don't really care about the console per se. What you buying the console means is that Nintendo gets to stand on the bridge between your console and game developers and demand 30% or whatever it is. Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

thih9 2y ago

How good is platform support - can I install e.g. Diablo 3 and have the thumbsticks control the character and not a virtual mouse? Or would I need to remap the input myself?

WolfeReader 2y ago
It varies by game - if the devs created a default control scheme, the Deck will load that by default and you're good to go. (The green check mark means that Valve verified this behavior, as well as other things.) And if not, the Deck UI makes it pretty easy to create your own mappings and share them, or download "community layouts". You don't need a Deck to try it - you can run Steam in "big picture mode" on any computer, with a controller, and get the same UI which the Deck uses.
- thih9 2y ago
  I was going to check that and I realized i can’t find diablo 3 on steam. I know I could install it myself through some other online store. Still, I wish there were cartridges that “just worked”; consoles (including today’s Nintendo) got that part right IMO.
tomnipotent 2y ago
Steam's Input system is great, and many people will launch non-Steam games through Steam specifically for the controller mapping. Any game with controller support (console) works flawlessly with the Deck, or any PC using a controller. I don't think I've come across a game that doesn't work out of the box.

GardenLetter27 2y ago

It's one of the best devices I've ever bought. I've used it for all sorts of stuff from gaming on flights, to local multiplayer, to controlling a robot car, to watching YouTube with adblocking, etc.

vinceguidry 2y ago

> According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way. Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.

seba_dos1 2y ago

That's an editorialized title ("The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly") and subtly different than what the article actually states. I don't think Steam Deck was made particularly software-freedom friendly. I do think that it managed to not be software-freedom unfriendly, and that's because unlike other vendors Valve did not care to make it so. It's a subtle, yet non-negligible difference that leads to different outcomes.

dezzadk 2y ago

> The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know. First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys. Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other. Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades. Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever. Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine. Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing. My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really.. Native Linux ports matters!

deleted 2y ago
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bigyabai 2y ago
> the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK, without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux at all. It's not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed. There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance. > Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update. > to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.

Fwirt 2y ago

The selling point of a Steam Deck is that it is a PC console. One of the problems with the PC gaming market is that even though in theory all PCs are "compatible", the reality for game developers is very different. Different PCs have subtly (or not so subtly) incompatible software and hardware, and it's up to OS developers to try to maintain some semblance of compatibility, and game developers to ensure that their product runs on as many configurations as possible. The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense. The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success. People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.

benoror 2y ago

> I had no issues installing Epic Games Except Fortnite =(

skeptrune 2y ago

I don't think a product being freedom friendly is going to make it a success in and of itself, but seeing one always makes me smile and that's a win in my book.

preisschild 2y ago

> You can’t run arbitrary programs of your choice on an Android phone without rooting, or on an iPad or an iPhone without jailbreaking. Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)

pjmlp 2y ago

> Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux. This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.

Mr_Eri_Atlov 2y ago

The steam deck is so cool, I can't wait for the steam box revolution to begin