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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

#391

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.

I think it’s simpler than that. They looked at the Nintendo Switch and decided to copy it, but for the PC. Nintendo was the genius involved. What Valve did is why Microsoft is successful. They executed someone else’s idea very well. Which isn’t that easy to do.

Khm, PSP, Gameboys, etc. Handheld gaming devices have quite a lot of history.

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

#392
post #264
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I also love the steam controller but honestly I think its biggest innovation was the community collaboration aspect of sourcing controller configurations. There is a lot less trouble in getting into a game initially if I can browse a ranked list of the best configs and seamlessly switch between them.

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

#393
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've especially used it for reading visual novels. I bet you have. wink Lol

Steam definitely has porn games but publishers usually need to cut the actual R18 content from Steam releases of eroge. For some games, you can restore those removed parts with either official or fan patches, but those usually require you to run some kind of an installer executable. And since applying patches is such a pain in the neck in a Wine environment, the Steam Deck actually makes for kind of a bad device for…

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I haven’t played one of those games in at least two decades lol. But while on Steam, I did click on a “gameplay” video for some popular game recently, and the gameplay definitely looked very graphic to me. Not that I’m opposed to it lol.

(Also, not a direct reply to your comment about trying to install something on the Steam Deck, but the comments here about cloud saves working seamlessly don’t compare to my experience. I mean, it wasn’t hard to fix. I’m a software engineer and could follow the instructions on some wiki to move some specific file in the terminal. It only took like 2 15 minutes max, including finding the wiki itself and a workaround without having a Bluetooth keyboard. But still, it was more than I wanted to do and I initially thought I was going to go down a rabbit hole. The device is still really good though!)

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

#394
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.

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

#395
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the 256GB version which has regular screen. Glare hasn't bothered me inside at all in the year and a half I've owned it. However, I have not played it outside - in the shade / twilight it may be OK depending on your personal threshold. In sunlight, forget about it :) FWIW I've added a microSD card and it's fine. Updating the internal nVME is not on my radar, because the whole point of SteamDeck, for me and my…

Note that there’s something like 30x difference between SD and NVME performance. Not an issue for smaller games, but definitely something to keep in mind for games that stream data. On the other hand you’re likely not using the largest textures and models games come with anyway.

That was my understanding as well of the upper limits of bandwidth of the two technologies.

But several folks around the interwebs have done practical tests of loading actual games from internal nvme vs external microSD in steam deck, and actual differences were far lesser than specs would indicate.

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

#396
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with the design? That link looks sketchy, btw.

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=1K9ByWPqYtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpjrbHFv_dA And this one, 6 years ago already! https…

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.

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

#397
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's wrong with the design? That link looks sketchy, btw.

And you got downvoted for asking me a question Something fishy going on

bit weird. I think some people hate short form writing, like my "btw" could've come across bad to them. Like redditors and raging against emoji

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't sell anywhere remotely near 60 million. That was an offhand comment from Todd Howard who was being a bit misleading. He was mixing all the different versions of Skyrim (Skyrim, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Special Edition) and calling them simply Skyrim as a whole. It's like saying "Mario" has sold a billion copies. If you're not familiar with the series, those aren't like 'game of the year' type collections, but dist…

Most of the sales of the "original" Skyrim were on Xbox 360 if sources are to be believed, Wikipedia has the 360 version as selling 13.7 million put of 23. And the PS3 version may have even outsold PC. Obviously anecdotal but that's where most of my friend base played it too.

I think it's fairly safe to say that those numbers are unlikely. One of the only real specific, and accurate, figures we can rely on is Bethesda in late 2011 saying they'd shipped (not sold) 10 million copies to retail (which excludes PC). In 2013 they stated that 20 million copies had been sold (which would include PC). The two notes I'd add here is that they never gave anymore shipped numbers, which means they probably never broke another meaningful benchmark on it, and that console titles (with very few exceptions) are overwhelmingly front loaded in sales.

I'm quite confident on the PC sales, because there's an oddly consistent little metric. For games that sell beyond a minimum amount, about 1 in 60 players tends to leave a written review. So total sales tends to be in the ballpark of written_reviews * 60. For Skyrim, that's 180,000 reviews or 10.8 million sales [1]. Linked because the game's been unlisted since the Special Edition came out. That metric also matches the mod count near perfectly, as well as Bethesda's sales announcements, and also their behaviors like trying to do things like create 'paid mods' (and the predictable backlash it entailed). So I'd estimate reasonable figures would be around 10 million on the PC, and a 2:1 360:PS3 ratio for the remainder. So you end up with somewhere around 10 million, 7 million, 4 million, with a variance probably in the range of something like 30%.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/72850/The_Elder_Scrolls_V...

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

#399
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam definitely has porn games but publishers usually need to cut the actual R18 content from Steam releases of eroge. For some games, you can restore those removed parts with either official or fan patches, but those usually require you to run some kind of an installer executable. And since applying patches is such a pain in the neck in a Wine environment, the Steam Deck actually makes for kind of a bad device for…

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I haven’t played one of those games in at least two decades lol. But while on Steam, I did click on a “gameplay” video for some popular game recently, and the gameplay definitely looked very graphic to me. Not that I’m opposed to it lol. (Also, not a direct reply to your comment about trying to install something on the Steam Deck, but the comments here about cloud saves working seamle…

I think the issue with cloud saves is that developers are pretty free to use them as they wish, and some of them wish to use them in craptastic ways.

I spent a couple of hours diagnosing why I couldn't get save files for a particular VN sync via the cloud between my Steam Deck and my gaming PC. Turns out that they implemented cloud saves so that Steam syncs the cloud saves to Location A on the file system, and when the game boots up, it checks if there's a save file in Location B, it loads that, and if there isn't, it copies the save file from Location A to Location B and then loads it. The end result was that all of my Steam Deck saves were on my gaming PC immediately after I installed the game on my gaming PC, but neither device ever refreshed the saves because the actual save location was different from the cloud sync location, and there was no mechanism to override local saves with cloud saves.

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the dev experience like? Did you do your development on the Steam Deck itself?

I did for the Linux port (using CLion and CMake files). But as I've said, I ended up dropping it before shipping since Proton on Steam Deck ran my Windows port so well. In the end, perhaps sadly, the Steam Deck was for testing only. I rarely boot into the Desktop any longer. CMake, BTW, was a great way for someone like me who does not know Visual Studio to get something working on Windows. (Xcode is familiar to me so…

Funny enough I am also working on a game project and use SDL2 for the cross-platform aspects (I don't need to learn some incredibly specific IDE, I get the control, but it abstracts away all the more boring stuff), but I specifically want to target the Steam Deck for my next PC game project.

Thanks for the tips!

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