The Official Steam Deck Thread

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

Conina said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Steam has over 10,000 games yet only 1300sh are officially compatible with the SteamOS.

And to me, that's not a good thing, especially with SteamOS is still in such an early stage. If Valve had 90, hell 80% of the games on Steam being officially verified, then sure. But instead, it's like 10% and they aren't even verifying the games fully to make sure they are flawless with SteamOS.

Steam has over 60,000 games. Over 20,000 games with a SteamDB rating of 70% or better.

But why do you assume that most (yet) unverified games won't work with SteamOS/Proton? The number of already compatible games without Valves official check will be in the thousands, maybe even in the ten thousands. Plus thousands of compatible emulated games.

So far I've started around 50 unverified games and almost all of them worked, from "The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles" to "Sunset Overdrive". In Heavy Rain some "six-axis" inputs are a bit tricky, f. e. rubbing Ethan dry after showering.

Sure, all I played are single player games / modes, but since I don't intend to play multiplayer modes on a handheld, I couldn't care less about "anti cheat" problems.

I don't have any doubt that most games will eventually be verified to work with the Steam Deck but that's not my issue. My issue is that the device is in it's very early stages with no safety blanket. When Valve said this would be a PC, I figured that Valve would do their own optimizations and what not on SteamOS but on Windows, the interface would work decently enough and the GPU driver support would be from AMD. The reality is that this doesn't seem to be the case which makes this a big issue because this is no longer a traditional PC. And that means that everything about it is up to Valve to do with some assistance from AMD.

This means that if say it doesn't pan out, then I can't just go to AMD's website and get the latest GPU driver and play the latest games at a reasonable performance on Windows. It also means that if Valve ever decides to stop supporting the Steam Deck, then it will be up to the open source community to provide driver support on Linux and not AMD. Now Steam Deck is obviously a success as the earliest you can get one is Q4 of this year and I am sure Valve will fulfill their promises eventually. But that eventuality is a long ways away and buying it now with limited Windows support feels too risky.

And even some single player games are having issues such as Horizon Zero Dawn as mentioned in the video. Once you go above 5 hours, it starts crashing or gives you stutters every 30 minutes because of Linux. Who knows what other issues games will have because Valve is clearly not testing the games fully.

Now maybe I am wrong and AMD just hasn't released official drivers yet on their website for Windows. Hell maybe I am just overthinking this in general. But at it's current stage with limited Windows support, I think I'd be better off waiting for the finished product which pains me because of how much potential this device has.

Chazore said:

Captain_Yuri said:

maybe I should get a refund and wait instead of committing.

Honestly, yeah, I would be in that same boat and it's why I'm just sitting back and waiting for things to pan out with the Deck. If I have to wait years and years for MS to finally release these features they keep boasting about for PC, then I'm going to have to for the Deck and it's supported games list/drivers as well.

At the end of the day though, I just want to move away from Windows, and that's taken time for Linux to reach this point, so with Steam OS, it will also take time to wait till it reaches a decent point for me to move over.

Everyone buying the Deck at this moment in time should know that they are all a form of early adopter, and it's why I choose not to be one, because I know the pitfalls of what that crowd get into when they choose to adopt stuff early on (it's also why I stopped bothering with AAA games day 1/month 1/sometimes year 1, because they mostly come out half baked, content and perf wise).

Yea like I knew I was going to an early adopter but I figured that the worst case will be that I can turn it into a Windows PC and have that as a fallback but alas, Valve decided to not go that route. While I still think it will be a success, I think I'd be better off with a wait and see approach. I wouldn't mind not using Windows once the Deck has reached it's final form but until it does, it's too much of a risk for me.

Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 13 March 2022