Valve Launches "Steam Deck Verified" Program For Games That Run Well On The Steam Deck

[Luke_Wolf]

I can't imagine they are "reviewing the entire Steam catalog". All popular titles? Sure. But even that is of thousands of titles. According to RPS there was over 30k games (excluding DLC and none-game software) in total as of 2019. Another figure I found suggested that around 10k games were released in 2020.

Yeah there is no way they are testing everything. Especially not thoroughly.

It's not quite as bad as you would think. They're not going to play the whole game through to do testing, based on the criterion shown. What will likely happen is that they will spend 15 minutes or so reviewing the basics and then maybe an hour or so of actual gameplay. Let's assume for the sake of argument that they have 50,000 man hours therefore worth of work, and that they have 10 people doing compatibility testing, 50000/10/8/5 = 125 Business Weeks to catch up or about 2 1/2 years.

It's explicitly built into the system that not all titles will be reviewed on launch, they have an "unknown" category for that purpose, and they've been working on this effort for who knows how long before they announced it, and if you dig into their dev page all new games released on steam will be subject to a steam deck compatibility check.

From a consumer standpoint as long as all of the big name games that are still relevant and thus that most people care about get a review then it doesn't really matter if it takes 3 years for the catalog to be completely reviewed. If I had to guess Valve has a whole lot more than 10 testers. They're a big enough company they could easily have 100 people doing testing and finish the whole thing within a quarter.

[cl333r]

I can't wait for the Steam Deck!!
Too bad it will be long until it reaches South America...

At least you have plenty of time to play with your sloths and capybaras while munching on cherimoyas and tamarillos.

[mirmirmir]

I can't imagine they are "reviewing the entire Steam catalog". All popular titles? Sure. But even that is of thousands of titles. According to RPS there was over 30k games (excluding DLC and none-game software) in total as of 2019. Another figure I found suggested that around 10k games were released in 2020.

Yeah there is no way they are testing everything. Especially not thoroughly.

Most of the games are actually simple games. It's very likely to work on wine/proton out of the box. There are only handful complicated AAA that would cause issues compared to all the games out there, and they have people and wine/proton devs attention

[tildearrow]

At least you have plenty of time to play with your sloths and capybaras while munching on cherimoyas and tamarillos.

Nope, in fact it's a urban area with very little forestation and very few wild animals that aren't dogs, cats or passerines. We do have some nice meals though, like potatoes (papa rellena, papa a la huancaína), lúcuma and ceviche.

[tildearrow]

I'd imagine in addition to "Steam Deck Verified" that would be labeled as "Steam Deck Optimized" (aka SteamOS/Linux)

What about "Steam Deck Exclusive"? We had too many Windows-only games already. ;p

[cl333r]

Nope, in fact it's a urban area with very little forestation and very few wild animals that aren't dogs, cats or passerines. We do have some nice meals though, like potatoes (papa rellena, papa a la huancaína), lúcuma and ceviche.

Too bad. If I lived in Brazil I'd get a small piece of land just to grow my own sub/tropical fruits.
I imagine growing cannabis is illegal.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

At least you have plenty of time to play with your sloths and capybaras while munching on cherimoyas and tamarillos.

chupacabras ?

[pal666]

This doesn't seem to mention native ports, but I did wonder whether Valve would incentivise studios to do native ports, perhaps on the basis that they'd run faster and use less battery power.

some native ports in fact run slower. so maybe valve should just incentivize studios to do games which run faster and use less battery power?

[smitty3268]

some native ports in fact run slower. so maybe valve should just incentivize studios to do games which run faster and use less battery power?

Yeah, people have this image that native games must be completely rewritten from the ground up in pure native linux code.

In reality, the porting companies just have their own internal wrapper layer that does the same thing WINE and DXVK are doing. You just don't see it.

That's the only viable way to port things for a low cost. And their solutions are stuck with whatever version they had when they released the port, while WINE/DXVK get the benefit of continuing improvements over time.

[CTown]

Where can I download the source code for Steam?

In my excitement in that SteamOS is just glorious open sourced everyday ordinary dekstop Linux with the Steam app, I completely forgot about the Steam app itself. Thank you.