Posted by todsacerdoti 4/3/2025
Except Fortnite =(
What problems have you seen?
Some popular examples of this;
1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck.
2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game.
Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings?
Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user.
I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved.
Developers are unable to opt out of the system and Valve will just put a "verified" tag on a game with zero input from a developer.
Valve needs to set proper expectations of who to be mad at when a game breaks on the Steam Deck if the developer themselves never pledged support.
Most users don't understand what an OS really is or how a game works on the Steam Deck (SteamOS) instead of Windows.
This is a big claim, is there evidence for this? I'm an end-user, not a developer, but there are plenty of games in Unknown status. I would assume that should be the default, not Verified.
I can see an argument that Valve has incentive to have flagship games get that Verified badge, but there is also precedence for them downgrading popular games after launch. For example, Spider-Man 2 recently went from Verified to Playable (rightfully so, in my opinion).
The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense.
The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.
Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.
Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades.
Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever.
Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.
Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing.
My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..
Native Linux ports matters!
You seem to be forgetting that Steam Machines existed back then, and Wine barely supported D3D9.dll in those days. Valve and Codeweavers did the majority of the work bringing up DXVK, without which there would be no DX11/DX12 game support on Linux at all. It's not exaggeration to say that the Steam Deck would not have been a success if DXVK never existed.
There's certainly cause to celebrate Wine's accomplishments reverse-engineering Win32. But it's far from the only thing required to get games running, and I think you've oversold it's importance.
> Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm..
Shocker. Given the way MacOS is treated by game developers, I'd much prefer translation be the focus instead of courting native ports that will break in 2 months from a glibc update.
> to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds
I'm not sure why. The GPU is where the lion's share of power consumption happens, and Proton uses the same Vulkan API that modern, native Linux titles target. Sure, you have to wait for shaders to cache, but you have to do that on most Windows PCs nowadays too.
Thats like saying you think I've oversold Chromium because Brave has done the heavy lifting (I bet you use Brave too, I sure don't nor ever will).. You sound incredibly confirming to the gamer-stupidity that revolves around the Steamdeck community.. You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork that is a few years old. You're exactly the type I'm talking about- get a grip.
I'll even go a step further, really - Wine isn't as technically impressive as DXVK. They're both large and complex projects, but the reverse-engineering required to get DX11 to run with Vulkan in realtime is a head-and-shoulders harder problem than mapping Win32 syscalls to a monokernel. Graphics performance was one of the biggest struggles Wine faced back in the OpenGL days, and the performance deficit still persists: https://linuxreviews.org/Wine_6.3_Built-in_vs_DXVK_1.8:_A_Co...
> You literally discredit Wine a decades old project to shine on a fork
Calling Proton a "fork" of Wine is like calling Fedora a "fork" of Linux. You're patently incorrect, and you're not really identifying how this is a bad thing for Wine or Proton users.
You just plain out refuse to see it, cuz you totally drank the kool aid.
Steamdeck have literally zero AAA-games compared to Nintendo, because thats the joy of owning a Steamdeck! Smearing diapers in Nintendos face and pirating their games like a true neckbeard, right?
Steam neckbeards are such manchilds. The "idea" of a Steamdeck sells more than the actual games and this is what this article proves. Sad, but true.
The catalog of games on Steam suck, objectively. Unpopular opinion maybe - to those that are addicted to browsing shitty new soulless games on Steam.
Wouldn't you have more software freedom on Windows? Because you can run both Windows and Linux software (via WSL2).
I use macOS, Windows and Linux daily. They are all pretty open to installing and running your own software. And all of them have some sort of security measures that prevent you from running arbitrary apps unless you close some scary warnings or bypass it with some flags.
Often we talk about software freedom in the context of open-source development and free-software licenses like the GPL. The Free Software Foundation stated as a bootstrapping organization to write open source software for the GNU platform (Linux/Unix standard userspace environment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
Valve is pretty well respected from that perspective. SteamOS is built on Arch Linux. They publish the source for most of their Linux tools https://github.com/ValveSoftware/. The development of Proton, their in-house compatibility layer that uses Wine under the hood, is also open source and developed with community involvement. Single hardware platform makes it easier to handle the morass of driver development. They upstream their changes to other projects. There are actually open source forks of things like Proton (https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom is a popular one).
And they made sure to integrate Flatpaks into their base OS image and the default image ships with the Flatpak market/browser, because Flatpaks can be easily installed and managed without conflicting with the base OS that they are managing... and it works. It really works. Even out of the box and without penetrating their management, you have a lot of freedom, and the fences are just advisory.
I'm sure they're not interested in it but they've got a decent solution for someone to start selling managed Linux desktops and laptops for end-users if they wanted to.
But calling Windows more free than Linux because you can virtualize Linux is a noteworthy statement alright.