Quoting: GuestBefore the 25th of February, Valve were claiming they'd tested "thousands of games" and people assumed what was visible via SteamDB was because of data mining.

However, it's since emerged Valve have only tested 1,000 since the Deck's announcement and the two month delay was because Valve were working on fixing things from feedback given by developers. It wasn't a component shortage after all, it was simply because the software wasn't ready.

It does seem they have tested fewer than the "thousands" they were indicating. Although not only 1,000, because 1,000 is just the ones rated verified or playable; a rating of unsupported also indicates testing has been done. Well, in theory at least.
But the rest of what you say has "since emerged" may perhaps be true, but can hardly be said to have "emerged". Certainly it's the first I've heard any such thing, and I've been following Deck news fairly closely. You suspecting or alleging something doesn't mean it has "emerged", which connotes some kind of consensus based on new evidence becoming public.

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Quoting: GuestEthan Lee once said to me, "Valve are incompetent", and this seems to confirm it. There's a reason they shouldn't be relying on Proton and a reason people should take what Valve say with a large pinch of salt.

I don't think there are any reasons they shouldn't be relying on Proton which are anything close to big enough to outweigh the reasons they should be relying on Proton, or rather have little choice but to rely on Proton.

But certainly this particular issue cannot be construed as a reason they shouldn't be relying on Proton. To the contrary, it seems to indicate that Proton is performing much better than they are currently admitting. Why they would be claiming that games don't work on Proton when in fact they do remains beyond me, but it obviously can't be a problem with Proton.

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Quoting: scaineI'm all for FOSS in games, but realistically I suspect it'll be decades before we see any traction in this direction due to the complexity of modern games (art, music, script, voice, animations, textures, AI, physics, shader programming, core programming, plus any other middleware etc).

About the best we can expect is FOSS game engines. Go Godot!

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Quoting: natis1I asked them last week "Wait what happened to the proton version?" And they said:

"i don't understand what's going on. we offer no proton version.

People unclear on the concept. You don't "offer" a Proton version, Proton runs your normal Windows version. Or doesn't, but either way it's not a special "Proton version".

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Quoting: dibzI guess I remember reading somewhere that Verified required more then the game to just work and that there were other requirements like fonts and interface elements not being too small. I have a strong feeling that rather then tagging games into the playable category that hit those problems, they put them under Unsupported.

But then what's the "playable" category supposed to be for? Valve's definition has been that if it works just right, it's Verified, and if it works, but not just right, with problems like the ones you mention, it's Playable.
If they instead stuff all those in Unsupported, they've got two categories instead of three and they no longer have a category for things that actually don't work. It subtracts a lot of information, and worse, it's information they say they're giving you. If they're doing that it's a stupid move.
Maybe one of their QA people is just incompetent. Or maybe they're doing a thing where in some cases they send off an email to the developers about flaws and bung the game into Unsupported until they hear back--but you'd think they could leave it officially Untested, or maybe Playable, and just have an internal flag that they're waiting for feedback/changes.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: kit89

Quoting: elmapulsnip

Best not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Now there's a quote worth saving for the future. Love it!

Hanlon's Razor [External Link]

Yeah, it's a pretty old saying. Probably applicable in this case IMO, but in general overused--there is more malice in the world than this saying wants to allow.

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Quoting: toorMaybe we should understand

it does not support SteamOS

as "don't ask us if it doesn't work, we are not responsible of your experience with the game on steamOS"

Sure, but then how should we understand

it cannot be played on Steam Deck

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Quoting: P1nkyif you really want to go down the "point & drool" route.

Classy.

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Quoting: Hori

Quoting: PhiladelphusHmm, let's math it out: so if March is "the first month", then "tens of thousands" is at least 20k. Then at least 200k for "hundreds of thousands" in April ("the second month"). "Beyond that it'll grow even quicker" but we don't have numbers, so assuming another (counterfactual) 200k for May and June, that's at bare minimum 620k units sold by the end of Q2, and probably a lot more. On the assumption that April is instead "the first month" (maybe they're still shaking the production line out in March), that's still 420k units (and again, probably a lot more).

Exciting times!

11k can qualify as "tens of thousands", and 101k can also qualify as "hundreds of thousands". Wouldn't be the first time (at all) people used those numbers as such.

People have no doubt done this. But then, people have made lots of grammatical errors; doesn't make them correct. Technically, though, if you have less than a second thousand you do not have plural thousands, much the way if you have one thing you do not have "a thousand" things. Part of another thousand is not another thousand. A man holding another man's liver in his hand cannot be described as "men".

Contrariwise, a release in February can accurately be described as a February release.

The guy sounded pretty confident, and seems to be a developer, not a PR person. I doubt he was pulling such a stunt.

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Quoting: PhiladelphusHmm, let's math it out: so if March is "the first month", then "tens of thousands" is at least 20k. Then at least 200k for "hundreds of thousands" in April ("the second month"). "Beyond that it'll grow even quicker" but we don't have numbers, so assuming another (counterfactual) 200k for May and June, that's at bare minimum 620k units sold by the end of Q2, and probably a lot more. On the assumption that April is instead "the first month" (maybe they're still shaking the production line out in March), that's still 420k units (and again, probably a lot more).

Exciting times!

That suggests that if March is the first month, by the beginning of May the Deck should be noticeably impacting the Linux numbers on Steam.

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