I have it on the wishlist from the initial coverage, it certainly looks pretty!

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My library (thanks @pb):
VERIFIED: 11 games (6.88%)
PLAYABLE: 10 games (6.25%)
UNSUPPORTED: 0 games (0.0%)
UNKNOWN: 139 games (86.88%)

Realistically, of those unknown I'm pretty sure all but 5* will be at least playable (in the sense that they will at least start and run), since they already work on my current machine. Of course not all of them will likely work well on an 8-inch screen (Paradox games, for instance), but I'm sure I'll still have plenty.

On the "newly verified in my library" front I note with interest Strange Horticulture (a puzzle game about identifying fictional plants and their uses as owner of a horticultural shop in a fantasy version of England), which only released on January 21.

*Those 5 include Eufloria and Q.U.B.E., both of whose original versions don't work with Proton but for both of which I also got a free copy of the refurbished edition which does, two non-game programs, and, amusingly enough, my "Steam Deck deposit". .

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Quoting: MasterSleortUbuntu 20.04 LTS with either a PS3 or PS4 controller connected via Bluetooth. Every other game works perfect like this. Even when using Steam input it gets borked.

Ah, gotcha. Definitely hope that gets fixed then! I got it from a friend showing it off to me on the Switch, and I have to admit that being able to select elements with the D-pad sounds easier than doing it via mouse and keyboard.

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Quotealthough, it does look perhaps a bit overly business-like.

That's a feature, not a bug. How else to disguise bringing one's Deck along to boring business functions?

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Quoting: MasterSleortI wonder whether Crosscode is going to be playable. It has a native build, but that one completely messes up the controls, which makes it unplayable with the native build.
The developers say that it is a problem with are JavaScript library they depend on and thus "are unable to fix it".
I hope the steam deck gains enough traction, so that the developers try and fix the issue.
This game seems such a great fit for this device.

What distro are you having problems with? I played through the entirety of CrossCode (including DLC) last year on Debian 10 and had zero issues. I even fired it up just now to confirm it was the native build and not Proton.

Oh, wait, do you mean it doesn't work with controllers? (Since I played with mouse and keyboard and don't own a controller to check.) If that's the case I hope it gets fixed, since this was once of the games I definitely was going to play on the Deck.

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What wristy wrack hath WRAEK wrought? Readily in evidence is the wreck wreaked on hapless wrenched wrists, restlessly arrested above the touchpad, rapidly escalating into wreckage as they relentlessly wrestle gravity so that your character isn't suddenly wrested into roving abreast of a wretched reckoning wreathed with enemy fire when least expected! At least when using WASD* at present I can rest my wrist on the wrist-rest reckless of consequence.

*Which is, I reckon, 10% of my library, at best?

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Quoting: eldarionAs much as I like seeing devices with Linux being sold, I really don't understand the hype of steam deck. I like playing a good game on a mobile device as much as I like watching a good movie on my phone. Meaning, not at all.

Don't get me wrong, small devices like this are great for casual gaming, but playing Witcher 3 on this is like going to the cinema and only watching half of the screen. You simply don't get the full experience.

Valve's hyping this up as being powerful enough to run all the latest and most demanding games, but I'm going to be using it for things like playing a round of Terraforming Mars in bed, or Filament, or other similar things. Something simple and relaxed, where the trade-off of not being on my PC's large monitor is worth the increase in comfort to my aging bones (or the portability, for when I'm traveling and can't bring my PC). Your mileage may vary of course. To each their own.

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Quoting: Mountain ManThat doesn't mean the team is manually testing each and every game. I just can't see how that would be practical or efficient. But of course, I don't have Valve money, so perhaps I lack the correct perspective.

I mean, I doubt they have people 100-percenting every single game to check that there isn't an obscure mini-game that shows up 57 hours in where the text is too small to read. Even I would find that unreasonable. But a look at the official criteria shows that some (if not most) of those things would be virtually impossible to test in an automated fashion. Pretty much all games come as precompiled binaries with no API to allow automated testing of their internals, so checking most of those things would require practically a world-class AI that knows how to use controllers to open games and check things like whether an arbitrary game's menu is traversable with just a controller.

Whereas, for most games, a human could check off the verified criteria reasonably comfortably in less than an hour (with the caveat that maybe there's a place where text size gets too small or something else breaks later in the game, but for most games an hour should give a reasonably good idea). Assuming a single person can thus check 8 games a day (1/hour, 8-hour working day), by hiring 100 people (using the loose change found down the back of the sofas at Valve HQ) they could verify 800 games a day. That'd then take them 80 days to check all ~64,000 games on Steam. That's gotta be way easier than doing the Tesla-levels of machine learning that would be required to do that testing automatically. (They also don't have to allocate testing time equally, they could spend more time on the most popular games and push the least popular ones off until after launch.)

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Put me down for 1,100 verified games at launch! Liam, you should definitely have an article at launch noting who guessed the closest.

Quoting: elmapulits impressive when compared to other console launchs, but its not when compared to 90.000 games avaliable on steam for windows, and even more than that avaliable for windows in general.

i hope console gamers buy this thing like hotdogs, and pc gamers dont get too inclined to install windows on it, not until most games (be it steam games or not) work on it.
then it would be too late to reverse the trend.

The thing is, people aren't playing all those (64,000, per CatKiller) games equally; I'd bet anything the number of players/owners of games looks like an exponentially decaying distribution. Thus, if Valve has the top 1,000 verified, that might already account for, say (to pick a random number), 50% of play time. If the next top 3,000 are "merely" playable, that might get you to 70%, etc. Pretty much anyone who buys a Deck is going to have games in their library they can play, even if they can't play all the games in their library*. So the question becomes, what fraction of players are going to motivated enough by a specific unplayable game (or set of games) to figure out how to install Windows on their Deck (and forego SteamOS's built-in sleep features and such)? It won't be zero, because of course somebody's going to do it (if just for the novelty value to put it on social media), but I'm betting the majority of people aren't going to bother taking the chance and going to the work of installing a new OS if most (or all!) of what they actually play already works.

*At launch, that could change over time of course.

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I'm really glad for that first tweak, that would've been really useful these past four months while I was moving and only had a crappy university-provided MacBook with ~10 GB free space to game on. Much easier than clicking on each of the (relatively small number of) games in my library that support MacOS and hitting Install to check how much space they'd take up.

Quoting: SolitaryAnyone thinking about using current beta client should be careful as it currently has nasty issue on certain distributions where the client only renders black content and buttons don't really work. Check issue link for possible workaround or stay on stable version.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/8373

Yeah, I had that issue starting with an update on Sunday. Switching back to stable fixed it, thankfully.

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