Steam Deck and SteamOS hit 20,000 playable games

I feel like some of us should bake a celebratory cake and tag @Steam and @ValveSoftware in a picture of it


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 13 Jun 2025 at 5:45 pm UTC

Well now. That's a nice big round number. You could put that on an ad.

I feel like some of us should bake a celebratory cake and tag @Steam and @ValveSoftware in a picture of it

But THE CAKE IS A LIE

In all seriousness though, 20K games is extremely impressive Remember that PS4 only had 3,500 games, and Nintendo Switch only has 6000 titles. Both consoles have existed far longer than the Steam Deck though

This is a great number for marketing purposes. I am always surprised at how many of my 250 Steam games just work on Manjaro. However their should be a quality rating like Great | Good | Just Okay.

which game was number 20.000?

And which percent of all the PC games do these 20k games make?
Meanwhile, if you install Windows™, there will be 100% of the PC games available.

The total amount of PC games literally cannot be counted. For Steam, 140,096 according to SteamDB.

And no, Windows actually cannot run them all, Windows does have its own compatibility problems too. Far less, but issues do still exist. Not sure why you're pointing it out though, we all know the hill Linux gaming has to climb here.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 14 Jun 2025 at 8:18 am UTC

In any case, the number of games marked playable and supported has little to do with the number of cames you can actually play effectively. Most games just haven't been tested. And, these days most of the games that don't pass have more to do with the Steam Deck as a physical device, like not working well with small screens or controllers or whatever, than with Linux. Those wouldn't work on the Deck even if you for some bizarre reason installed Windows.

The gap is not that big. The important issue at this point is not so much actual incompatibility, it's more the anti-cheat situation.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 15 Jun 2025 at 5:47 pm UTC

And DRM! For visual novels. DMM's entire catalogue is unplayable on Linux because Soft-Denchi doesn't work through Wine right now.

A portion of DLsite's games are unplayable on Linux if they use DRM other than PlayDRM. And physical editions of visual novels, if they are encumbered by DRM, usually don't work either.

I haven't tested them, but I would be very surprised if Johren's visual novels worked either.

Still, that leaves you with a lot of visual novels from DLsite and Steam to play.

So is the DRM just a blind spot, or is there some technical reason that stuff can't, or is very hard to make, run in Wine?

I don't really know. I believe Catkiller was of the opinion that it was a blind spot and (my opinion follows:) because Proton development is focused on Steam games, which don't ship with Soft-Denchi or BuddyLauncher or DMM Game Player or any of that horrible stuff, they haven't needed to make it work.

And certainly, there is a lot of DRM in games on Steam that works in Proton, I've heard.

I looked up the WineHQ bug for Soft-Denchi specifically years ago, and the problem is the DRM tries to call some sort of string encryption function in the Windows API that is only partially implemented in Wine, so it fails. Somebody submitted for a patch for it years ago - I forget if it was merged or not.

Edit: Here's the link: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52441 - Looks like somebody submitted an anonymous patch (????) and took off. Never got merged...

So, if they focused on it, I'm sure they could get it to work. But it seems pretty low priority as Japanese language visual novels are a niche among niches. And according to WineHQ, it's no fun trying to get copy protection to work in Wine: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Copy-Protection

Fortunately, I'd say over 90% of visual novels work just fine in a Windows VM that you can run inside of Linux. They're very undemanding games. Hell, you could probably run most of them on a Windows XP VM.


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 17 Jun 2025 at 4:20 am UTC

I'm still thinking getting Linux-native games takes priority. Even with Windows compatibility issues (which are marginal at best and) if two years ago Linux had 12% of all PC games and now it has only 10% then it is a net loss.

What I am trying to say is there is no point celebrating a victory in battle if we are losing the war. And what I want to know is… How are we faring in this "war"? Does Linux share grow or does it shrink?

P.S. I am firmly in the NTNB camp.

I think you're mistaking what is the battle and what is the war, here.
Linux user share is the war. Linux native game share is a battle, which will ultimately be won automatically if the wider war is won. And lost automatically if the wider war is lost.

The Linux user share war is won by people switching to Linux and buying devices, say to play games on, which happen to have Linux on them. And one big question people will ask when considering whether to switch, or to buy such a device, is "Can I play my games?"

If the answer is entirely or mostly "No", they will not switch or buy. We saw this with the Steam Machine, which admittedly had other problems, but that was key among them. Even "sorta half and half" is not good enough.

If the answer is entirely or mostly "Yes", they may switch or buy. We see this now with the Steam Deck, which is selling very well. Since the introduction of the Steam Deck, the Linux share on Steam has gone from less than 1% to approaching 2.5%. Some of that is from the Deck itself, some is from increases in desktop Linux. Both of these increases are certainly dependent on the effectiveness of Proton.

If this increase continues for a few more years, Linux will be hitting numbers that make it worth money to pay attention to. Then native Linux games will certainly increase. I think that since Proton became a big thing, native Linux titles have decreased some, but it hasn't been nearly as much as I was expecting. The ease of using Proton seems to have been offset somewhat by increased buzz around the Steam Deck and SteamOS. But, if Linux user share had kept stagnating, native Linux game share would also, and probably in fact have continued to decline.

So, if someone wanting native Linux games were given a magic wand, which they could wave to kill Proton so developers wanting to target Linux would have to go native, this would be tactically a bare win in the very short term, but strategically disastrous. They would be fools to wave that wand.

While I understand the Idea of the "Ultimate Victory" is to increase Linux user share to 100%… Let's say, I'm not entirely convinced increasing the number of Proton™ users counts towards it.

Valve made it abundantly clear that it does not support Linux, it propagates "SteamPlay". Nowhere on their site you can find a Linux logo (sans "hwsurvey" page). And Proton™ while being in fact just a re-branded WINE for uneducated "new" user looks like a Valve's technology not associated with Linux. And you are right, a lot of (around 17.59% or so if we look up the GPU section for "AMD Custom GPU 0405") so called "Linux users" are in fact "Steam Deck" users and something tells me most of them do not know what Linux is besides the fact that it is the same thing that is on their Android™ smartphone. For all intents and purposes these "new" Linux users are just Windows users who just happen to have additional device for in-travel entertainment. Well, that or we are counting all Android™ smartphone owners as Linux users :)

Meanwhile, the number of Linux game releases has declined. Maybe not as much as some anticipated, but still it is a net loss. Now we have "Just Use Proton" and "It Works Fine With Proton" as two additional catch-phrases developers use to justify their rejection of Linux (in addition to "Linux Is Too Niche").

But Linux is too niche. We live in capitalism, what makes money is king, few are going to target a platform that's at 1% out of sentiment. Some, but not that many.

And all your "for all intents and purposes" and what Valve "intends" and talk of Android seem to almost intentionally miss the point. SteamOS is Linux--there's no discussion about this, there's no "well in this way it is and in this way it isn't"--SteamOS is Gnu/Linux, software that runs on SteamOS runs on Linux (which is not true of Android). What's running on the metal is Linux. And at the rate things are going, Linux will not be too niche. When Linux is no longer too niche, native Linux titles will increase--I've never seen a credible counterargument. And this is happening because Proton dropped the barriers to adoption. That's just the way it is.