Well, we’ve already seen CDs sold in fake books, thumb drives as keychains, and flash drives in credit cards to make them easier to carry and find... I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar being done for the Deck if it reaches a sufficiently large userbase, if only as a collector item or Kickstarter exclusive. Pretty hard to make an anything-themed microSDXC considering the form factor and the fact you won’t see it while it’s in use, but as a piece you take out of a bigger collector item, it could work.

I imagine the appeal would be bigger for heavy 100 GB+ games in places with slow/capped Internet, though in this day and age the files would already be outdated and require a patch by the time they reach consumers anyway. Besides that, it would just be a more expensive drive to store more games on. GameCube memory cards served a similar function but you could see their stickers while they were plugged in, and on some of them write down the games (saves) within.

I could imagine them being used to sell bundles of smaller Linux-native store-agnostic games, or with accompanying Steam keys, e.g. "20 kid-friendly games for you child’s Deck" or "the complete [insert franchise here] collection on the go", but just typing this makes it sound gimmicky as hell, like those cheap movies and games in cereal boxes back in the day.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CatKillerThe platform sales situation is already messy, and Valve have already picked their solution: a sale counts as a particular platform if that platform has the most playtime at the end of the refund period, falling back to the platform the sale was made on, falling back to Windows. Until Linux has more than 50% market share, that last step isn't going to change.

And considering that a lot of customers will be playing mostly games they already own for the near future, which are already written down as Windows sales for the most part, I imagine Valve will want a very clear picture of the Deck’s usage both in terms of play time and what is getting played – both for their own R&D and to incentivize developers to support Linux or Proton compatibility. So I’m curious to see what changes they make to the surveys or other forms of telemetry towards that end.

If they want the Deck to be seen as successful, they can’t miss out on the numbers "wasted" on past sales and stats being skewed in favor of Windows based on where the sale was made or the ratio of Windows/Deck play time in the first two weeks alone.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: damarrinThe SD has ABXY buttons, but not RB/LT etc. For some reason, Valve decided to take these from Playstation and they’re L1,R2 and so on.

Interesting. That suits me fine as RB/LT mean nothing to me, whereas "left 1/right 2" is pretty self explanatory.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAnd that 5% isn't a purely random figure. We don't know how much the Steam Deck is going to sell, but I don't get the impression 4 million or so Steam Deck sales in the next year or two is out of bounds. That kind of number would boost the number of Linux gamers on Steam to around 5% from its current ~1%. And that massive increase could not have happened without Proton.

I know we’re talking estimates and projections anyway, but do your numbers take into account the fact that a large number of Deck purchases will be by people who already game on Windows Steam? That’s really going to blur the OS share statistics with people owning multiple devices with different systems installed. I don’t know how well we’ll be able to gauge Linux’s penetration of the Steam market once the Deck is out, when we all know how spotty the survey coverage is. If the survey shows up at all on the Deck, I imagine even fewer people being willing to take the time to submit it while gaming on a portable device.

Quoting: SolitaryHow can it be "mark of shame" if the publisher releases the game only for Windows and does not care about some other (new/different) platform? Do you expect that they will lose Windows users because of this new platform that the game isn't even running on?

While I’m in the camp of "those publishers can suck it", I can see your second question happening to some extent: considering that Steam lets you buy a game once and play it on multiple devices, people who own both a Deck and a Windows PC are going to be looking for games that work on both – not necessarily exclusively, but preferentially. And IF (big if) the "Great on Deck" Store tab becomes the default on all devices and not just Decks, that would indeed mean those publishers lose visibility on all of Steam for not supporting that platform.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KohlyKohlThe icon for Playable makes it seem like it'll have issues when in reality it will not.

Well, it will if you’re a non-technically inclined user who wants a "just press play" experience, depending on what criteria caused the game to fail to attain Verified.

Quoting: finaldestI also Imagine that game devs will do what it takes to get that little green "seal of quality" badge next to their game so as to be featured in the primary store page on the deck unit.

Good little point there I hadn’t considered! Many companies will want front page visibility enough to make some simple tweaks.

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: SalvatosDue to "appropriate controller input icons" alone, I feel like a lot of games will fall short of Verified. I rarely see the right icons for my DualShock.

"Appropriate" is "appropriate to the Steam Deck," and they accept Xbox prompts as a suitable substitute for those.

Ah, good to know! I forgot/failed to notice the Deck uses ABXY as well, so that’s a convenient way for Valve to sidestep that issue completely.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestThe chosen terms are not very clear to me.
"Verified, Playable, Unsupported and Unknown"
Is "Playable" better or worse than "Verified"? What does "verified" even mean? It could mean it has been verified as not working.
"Unsupported", ok, but it doesn’t tell if it’s working or not.
"Unknown" is of course not helping much either.

I’m not asking for the answers, just saying they should choose terms that immediately make sense.

They seem clear enough to me.
Verified is often used on major Internet platforms to mean "curated and authorized by the platform owner". Pretty much a seal of approval to buy without worry.
Playable pretty strongly implies that it’s not more than just playable. It works, but has issues. Especially clear when paired with the icon and the knowledge that it could have been Verified instead.
Unsupported means it’s not meant to be played on the Deck and you’re on your own if you decide to buy it anyway. Sends a pretty clear message even though it doesn’t tell you exactly what’s wrong about it, which the details modal presumably will address.
Unknown can’t be much clearer, really. No compatibility info available. Buy at your own risk or check the forums.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Want to see what they've got so far? You can check it out on Deck Verified.

Are you seeing an actual list there, Liam? I only see this text:

The team is currently working on a way for you to be able to check the compatibility category of each of the games in your own library ahead of launch.

In addition, you’ll soon be able to see which games in the Steam catalog have already gone through Steam Deck review, and what compatibility category they fall in. More on this soon.

----
Due to "appropriate controller input icons" alone, I feel like a lot of games will fall short of Verified. I rarely see the right icons for my DualShock.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quite! After so many companies got cold feet following the Steam Machines not panning out, it’s a relief to see the industry still willing to go along with Valve on this new approach :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: elmapuli was trying to figure out what anti cheat solution an specific game uses and found this usefull site:

https://levvvel.com/games-with-kernel-level-anti-cheat-software/ [External Link]

Thanks for the link! I expected more games, I didn't really see anything there that I might be interested in. Probably a side effect of not paying attention to Windows game releases in the first place :P

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: InhaleOblivionGuild Wars 2 has had this feature built into it's launcher for a while now with patches. Basically you can update to about 25%-30% of the patch and load the game up while it continues to update in the background.

The first Guild Wars did that too. I remember having to wait several minutes for each new map to download in-game on my slow Internet connection, making it nearly impossible to find anyone to play with without getting kicked out or left behind.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If it works anything like the shader pre-caching, I’m not looking forward to it. 2+ hours of processing for no noticeable gains and it has to do it again every time the client is updated (or whatever the actual trigger is)? No thanks.

Though to be fair, that last part seems to have gotten better with the implementation of their new Downloads page.

View this comment - View article - View full comments