I think the Custodian Initiative is one of the better decisions Paradox has made. I get that they have to keep cranking out new shinies to get people to continue supporting them with DLC purchases, but it's great that they can devote a bit of resources into going back and polishing up older stuff.

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Steam Workshop support would be cool. I've dabbled with mods in the past (even made a few simple proof-of-concept creature mods), and it'd be nice to have the ease of the Workshop to install them.

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Steam Machines were a (to be brutally honestly) inferior "solution" to a non-existent "problem". (How do I play all my PC games at home → on the Windows desktop I already own; why would I need another desktop that plays fewer games?) For Linux gamers they were superfluous, for Windows and Mac gamers they were a downgrade. It's completely inevitable that they didn't go anywhere.

The Steam Deck, on the other hand, is a solution to a problem that doesn't really have a great solution yet. (How do I play my library of PC games on the go/while away from my main gaming rig?) Yes, there are laptops and other handheld computers, but both are more expensive and typically running Windows, which ironically works against them in this case due to its terrible fit on a portable device. Valve's offering an OS made to work with games, while also serving as a general-use system if need be. The fact that it can't play every game at the time of release is less important, both because Valve are committing to getting as many working as possible, and because the requirement of a Steam account to buy one means that most people getting a Deck likely already have a gaming machine of some sort (so if a game doesn't work on the Deck, they're not locked out of playing it completely, and they likely have other games that do work while they wait).

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I tried out two more demos last night:

Tinykin
This left me so confused. Mechanically, it's a very close copy of Pikmin (finally, someone made a PC version of it!) where you lead around a group of "tinykin" which you can throw at things to, e.g., move them, but thematically… I feel like I'm missing something, as the presentation almost feels like the protagonist (named *snerk* "Milodane") is some established character in another genre (like a comic book or a cartoon or something) who's been included in this game. But I have no idea if that's actually true or not and I came away utterly confused. It's a really large demo, I gotta say, I played for about an hour and a half and still hadn't finished exploring the truly gigantic first level after the tutorial levels.

Ixion IXION
I've seen it described as "Frostpunk in space", and while I haven't played Frostpunk to compare I did find it a rather interesting city-builder/boldly-go-where-no-one-has-gone-before simulator. It felt extremely similar to The Wandering Village in some ways, in that both involve a mobile living space where you mainly get new people and resources for your city by finding them in away missions. IXION certainly looks gorgeous; it was really neat being able to scroll around the Solar System where you start and see the planets and Sun.

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Quoting: jordicomaThe games I have that I'm sure are working are:
https://www.protondb.com/app/429660 (Tales of Berseria)
https://www.protondb.com/app/464920 (Surviving mars)
The others I haven't tested yet.
"Valve is still working on adding support for this game on Steam Deck": Probably it doesn't work with the resume feature?
"This game's anti-cheat is not configured to support Steam Deck": No anti cheat.
"This game is unsupported on Steam Deck due to use of an unsupported anti-cheat": No anti cheat.
"Steam Deck does not support VR games": No vr
"Games that fail to start at all": It starts with proton or native. If it's the case, they screw it all.

I'm really confused by Surviving Mars; its native versions works fine for me on Debian. I guess maybe if it doesn't have controller support as @whisze said? (I don't own a controller to be able to test if it does.)

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Quoting: StarterX4In case of TF2, it's officially abandoned.

TF2 Wiki:

QuoteLatest patch
January 5, 2022
(48 days ago)

Far from abandoned, though I suppose Starbelly might be right that its complicated controls will never get officially "verified" status.

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I tried out The Wandering Village last night and got hooked—I only meant to try it for half an hour or so until I got bored, and I ended up playing two hours until the demo ended. It's a city builder-type game with the twist that your band of refugees (from mysterious toxic spores growing around the world) is building their village on top of a gargantuan megabeast called an Onbu, which you can research the ability to feed, doctor, and guide. It travels about the world map passing sites of interest that you can explore as you pass by, and goes through different biomes which affect your strategy*. The art style is really cool, with a mixture of 3D and (really well done) 2D art. It does feel slightly bare-bones at the moment, as I researched probably about half the research tree in the demo, but it's also listed as version 0.1.11, so assuming the developers** keep up the good work on it it'll be an insta-buy from me.

I've got a few other demos I downloaded to try, I'll report back if any of them catch my fancy like The Wandering Village did.

*You can build "airwells" to collect water from humidity in the air, for instance, but they don't collect any water in the desert (which of course was what my Onbu spent the majority of its time wandering through!).

**A small indie team in Switzerland—there's a neat group photo of them as a splash screen when you first load the game, and it's made me realize just how detached we usually are from the real, human, people who make games. Usually they're just a name in a scrolling credits sequence, at best.

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I guess I can see where you're coming from, but I think that's an overly pessimistic way to see it. I've lots of talk of people buying it as a laptop replacement, so I don't think it's true that everyone buying it is getting for the "console experience" (I'm certainly not). Remember, in order to put in a reservation you have to have a Steam account (and have to have had it for at least a month for the first three days reservations were open), so basically all the people getting a Steam Deck for at least the next several months* are going to be people who are familiar with PC gaming and its quirks (because not even Windows games are 100% bug free), who've likely seen Valve's reminders that it's just a mobile PC, and who aren't going to throw up their hands in despair and swear financial ruin on Valve if they find so much as a single bug. (Who knows, it might even prove to be a less buggy experience than a lot of Windows gamers are expecting!) Game-breaking bugs should be fixed, of course, and I expect they will pretty promptly once the outcry of players reaches a critical mass.

*Based on the fact that I managed to get my reservation in by 1.5 hours after they opened, and I'm still "after Q2 2022".

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QuoteA little Half-Life on the go? Will you be playing this one on Deck?

As one of the few FPS games in my library, yeah, I might try it just to see how it handles.

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Huh, I've never thought to try Cities: Skylines with Proton, since it already runs perfectly fine natively on my computer. Maybe I should do a comparison. 🤔

Edit: I was going to test it, but switching to Proton doesn't bring your saved games along, so I didn't have a city in progress for a fair comparison. I did note that the Windows launcher lacks the "Continue" button found on the native launcher, interestingly.

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