Quoting: MohandevirDo we have any sales figures for these Windows handheld? Judging by the Steam hardware survey, they may be cannibilizing one another for a small fraction of the handheld market, leaving the Steam Deck untouched with the vast majority of that market. Not sure it would make sense to Microsoft to invest in a custom handheld os, if that's the case.

The estimates I've seen are that the Deck has sold its "multiple millions" and the Ally has sold ~500k - but they might have had 499,999 returns. None of these other devices have enough users to show up in the Steam Hardware Survey, but the Deck does.

The value to Microsoft isn't in hardware sales (just like it isn't for Valve); it's to say "Windows is a gaming OS, honest!" Same as for the DirectX-box.

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Quoting: lejimsterWith all these Windows handhelds being released I wonder how long it will be before Windows introduced a custom OS that competes with SteamOS.

I think that if it happens - if the Windows also-rans that Microsoft have paid for don't do the trick of blunting the Deck's effectiveness as a Linux gaming demonstration device - then it will be Xbox-branded rather than Windows-branded and will only play games from the Microsoft Store. No Steam, no EGS, no GOG, no Itch, but you will get Game Pass, Activision, Blizzard, id, Bethesda, Arkane, and all the other games studios they've bought. Whether the market would go for that - especially if getting your games from the Microsoft Store also let you use them on iOS and Android - I couldn't say.

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we aim to address market pain points and dedicate efforts to the handheld space

They haven't, though. It's still got an awful layout and no trackpads. Even in the saddled with an OS that's absolutely awful for a handheld PC sector of the handheld PC market they haven't fixed anything. Maybe this one can avoid destroying its own SD cards, but that's not a given.

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Quoting: PenglingI'd guess that it's Steam being too strict with its criteria for the Fest. I noticed it with the upcoming Dinos vs. Robots Fest, for example - just having robots or dinosaurs isn't good enough for inclusion, a game has to go in-depth into the societal implications and so on, so I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was going on here, too.

They've got plenty of similar games in there. I'd expect Sega just didn't opt in for some reason.

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Still, it would be nice no matter what distribution of Linux you pick, if we can just tell people to "go here" to get whatever app it is they're after rather than having to do a support-dance to find out their specific distribution and version to see what's available to find out how they can grab something.

We already can. The "app store" interfaces like Discover don't care if you're on a distro that uses debs, rpms, or whatever, or if you're pulling snaps from snapcraft or flatpaks from flathub; they'll just present a list of applications and an install button. Packaging formats are only of interest to distro maintainers and angry people on the Internet - end users have no reason to care.

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I can recommend Parkitect [External Link] (native / Deck Playable), which is 50% off in the sale.

I'm surprised Two Point Hospital (which is also a great game) isn't included - it seems like it would have been a good fit.

I have Megaquarium [External Link] and Prison Architect [External Link] (native / Deck Playable for both) but I've not actually got around to playing either of those, so I can't specifically recommend them.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThat is interesting--although I think to be fair we should note that many games that don't sell could be perfectly sincere, even good, games that just didn't happen to find their audience.

That is true. And elsewhere in Valve's document they say that the limited community stuff doesn't affect sales for genuine games - it just scuppers those games that only exist for card/emoji/whatever farming.

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Quoting: pbYay, new record for released asset flips! :whistle:

Interestingly, Steam does appear to track this, and it's exposed on SteamDB's year graphs.

All the community trinkets get unlocked for a game "as games reach certain player and sales metrics that give confidence that a reasonable number of customers that are engaged with the game" according to Valve. According to SteamDB, of the 2023 games 3,270 games passed that milestone and 11,258 didn't.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: XpanderPretty sure everything i have on my library works on linux. Though i guess there could be few free to play games that have anti-cheat and not working, which i have downloaded.

113 unsupported is way too much though, but its steamdeck verification.

VERIFIED: 165 games (19.86%)
PLAYABLE: 333 games (40.07%)
UNSUPPORTED: 113 games (13.60%)
UNKNOWN: 220 games (26.47%)

Don't forget that Steam Deck "Unsupported" does not necessarily mean the game doesn't work on Linux. It can mean that it doesn't work well with the form factor or with controllers or like that. So even if Proton worked 100% on everything and the anti-cheat people had given in and made all their stuff 100% work with Linux all the time, there would still be "Unsupported" titles.

VR, for example, is going to be 100% unsupported on the Deck even if it works fine with a VR headset attached to a Linux PC - or on Valve's hypothetical standalone VR unit.

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I figured it's been a while since I've done this, so I decided to have a look again.

 
Year     Total   Linux    Proportion 
2012       323      86      26.6%
2013       460     180      39.1%
2014      1601     495      30.9%
2015      2638     847      32.1%
2016      4279    1059      24.7%
2017      6146    1169      19.0%
2018      8002    1211      15.1%
2019      7691     971      12.6%
2020      9468    1105      11.7%
2021     11200    1202      10.7%
2022     12277    1426      11.6%
2023     14640    1625      11.1%
(this is games released each year, and how many of them have a Linux build, per SteamDB)

Looks like our share of developer attention has stabilised following the plummet after the Steam Machines, but there's not enough signal there to say if it's going up again. Hopefully it will pick up as our market share picks up.

There really are an awful lot of games on Steam - excluding future games and including games prior to 2012 there are 99,226 - of which 13,332 have Linux builds for an aggregate of 13.4%

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