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

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

#261

Post by gcoakes »

dagmx wrote: post #127
barney54 wrote: post #9

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.

I’ll go against the grain and say I don’t actually like mine very much and here’s why. I’ll caveat it with saying I got it for trips. - it’s underpowered. I knew that going in but so many games have to be played at either a really low setting or you chew through battery life quicker than i can manage. - battery life is pretty poor. Most games give me an hour or two of use. While I rarely game that long in a stretch,…

> - you can’t download while it’s asleep or in the background.

Are you saying this is something unique to the Steam Deck? If my Linux desktop is anything to judge by, you should be able to enable background downloads in Steam settings. I'm also fairly sure there should be a way to get logind to inhibit sleep during the download.

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

#262

Post by IggleSniggle »

thih9 wrote: post #162
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it. I use it fairly frequently too. The killer feature: instant on/off AKA 'Pause'. I've had a single-player game of CIV5 going for MONTHS now. The Steam Deck is PERFECT for pick it up, play for 5 minutes (or a couple of hours), pause it, and resume later. I have 2 main use-cases: -couch-playing. When the Wife-unit is watching her shows, or I get bored but still want to be in the same area as her; I can play t…

CIV 5 is also on Switch, that handheld also got praise for good on/off UX. Curious, does anyone own both devices? Is there any noticeable difference in device sleep support between Steam Deck and Switch?

The main feature I notice to be lacking on Deck in this regard is that you can't download updates while the device is "off." This doesn't really affect me personally because I can do background downloads with the kind of games I play without issue, but if I played AAA FPS type games I would probably find this quite annoying, since those games generally have large downloads and also require as much disk performance as you can muster.

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

#263

Post by bjord »

jeroenhd wrote: post #99
esjeon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but is this the year of linux desktop...?

Honestly, if Valve gives their Steam Machines concept another go with their much improved compatibility and operating system, I think they may have an actual chance. They'll need to come up with a replacement for their terrible Steam controller that tried and failed to be a mouse, but if they just stick the two sides of the Deck together I think they're already almost there. They'd also need to keep costs down like t…

Out of curiosity, did you personally actually use the steam controller? From what I've read/heard, it was a bit tough to get used to, but appreciated by many. My impression was also that the steam deck touch pads were just the next step in [the steam controller]'s evolution, rather than something else altogether.

All of that being said, I've unfortunately never had the opportunity to try it myself, so I don't really know.

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

#264

Post by zhynn »

Ruq wrote: post #259
currymj wrote: post #141

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.

>Failed Experiments Lessons Learned. The Steam Deck is the culmination of previous iterations. Even with the flop of the Steam Machines, The Steam Controller and Steam Link have ended up as Cult Classics, and there is the possibility they'll get revisions down the line, even if they end up minor niche releases.

I LOVE the steam controller, and the deck is essentially a steam controller with a computer+screen embedded into it. But the software for customizing the inputs are extremely sophisticated and deeply integrated into Steam. I don't think the deck would have been as good without the steam controller.

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

#265

Post by dagmx »

gcoakes wrote: post #261
dagmx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll go against the grain and say I don’t actually like mine very much and here’s why. I’ll caveat it with saying I got it for trips. - it’s underpowered. I knew that going in but so many games have to be played at either a really low setting or you chew through battery life quicker than i can manage. - battery life is pretty poor. Most games give me an hour or two of use. While I rarely game that long in a stretch,…

> - you can’t download while it’s asleep or in the background. Are you saying this is something unique to the Steam Deck? If my Linux desktop is anything to judge by, you should be able to enable background downloads in Steam settings. I'm also fairly sure there should be a way to get logind to inhibit sleep during the download.

It’s unique to the primary non-desktop mode of the steamdeck.

If you put it to sleep, it pauses downloads. Out of the box, it pauses downloads when you play games unless you enable a checkbox that says it will degrade performance.

If you switch to the desktop mode instead, you can download things as you would on a Linux desktop with all the other requisite performance state management caveats, and it’s very much now how the device is designed to be used.

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

#266

Post by zhynn »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #237

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

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.

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

#267

Post by bisby »

somenameforme wrote: post #248
plucas wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a bold statement. I would imagine the large majority of players of any mass-market title don’t know about or use any non-built-in mods.

It's going to depend on the game. Games like Skyrim are essentially just modding sandboxes, and you can measure this at least reasonably objectively. SkyUI is a single extremely popular mod for Skyrim. It's been downloaded by 6.5 million unique users from a single site hosting it [1], another 1.5 million on the Steam workshop, and who knows how many others from everywhere else. That is almost certainly a vast majorit…

~8 million downloads (and thats assuming duplicates don't get recounted?), vs 60 million copies sold [1] is still barely ~15%. This might mean that for PC, its more like 8 million out of 16 million and 50% of PC players are modding.

So in a best case, it's 50% of PC players (which may apply to steam deck), or worst case, less than 15% of all players (which may also apply to steam deck).

[1] - https://www.gamesradar.com/skyrim-has-sold-60-million-copies...

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

#268

Post by zhynn »

ekianjo wrote: post #43
KingOfCoders wrote: post #38

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

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

The steam controller customizability is an incredible feature that I doubt any other manufacturer will be able to compete on. It is bananas how fully-featured it is. The flexibility of being able to pop open a radial/grid menu with any input and map the items to hotkeys or other actions... just that alone is kind of nuts, but then you can have buttons that change "modes" and all of the inputs can have secondary effects.... you can toggle between "flight" and "ground" setups...

I have myself barely scratched the surface of the steam input features, but there is nothing that I have been unable to do with it. And that is so important when you are emulating games.

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

#269

Post by mcpackieh »

Maken wrote: post #114
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #42

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

Which makes me both happy and concerned. On one hand, I am finally able to use my main computer for gaming without having to deal with dual booting nor emulation (in the VW sense). On the other, Proton completely kills native Linux porting. Amnesia The Bunker being released only in Windows despite the developers' long story supporting Linux was likely influenced by this.

If it works, it works. Proton isn't going anywhere; even if development is abandoned old versions of Proton will still exist, so games that forewent native Linux support in favor of Proton will still work.

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

#270

Post by afruitpie »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #247
NelsonMinar wrote: post #175

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.

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 emulatio…

For those on macOS, there is an excellent new project called Whisky [0] built around CrossOver and Apple's Game Porting Toolkit.

[0] https://github.com/IsaacMarovitz/Whisky

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