Steam Deck hits 17,000 games playable and verified | Hacker News Reader

Steam Deck hits 17,000 games playable and verified

gamingonlinux.com

80 pointsWhyNotHugo47 comments

Wow, that's about ~12,000 games just about a year ago. 5000 in one year -- a 40% increase -- is huge.

I did a lot of gaming in 2020, and it felt like games then just ran on Linux as a rule rather than an exception, thanks to Proton. Congratulations to Valve on the rapid pace of milestones, and congratulations to Windows 8 (the original impetus for Valve's investment in Linux gaming) for kickstarting the impossible.

It's the nice side of the project running for so long. At first, lots of extra work was needed for the support for each extra title. Now they have so much coverage that every compatibility fix likely unlocks more then one game, so the numbers just keep growing.

Its actually very impressive when you consider that the Playstation has less than 5000 games overall. And Switch has around 4761 games listed on Wikipedia. Now Sony and Nintendo have nice exclusive games, but Steamdeck gained more supported games in a year than that these consoles have at all.

Steam Deck is the reason I’ve finally beat so many games on my backlog. Being able to pick up and play while on the couch, before bed, or just bring it traveling. Fantastic. I basically only buy games that are playable or verified on the Steam Deck these days.

This is a very conservative number, as well, since ProtonDB is always much further ahead of Steam. Many games are labeled Unverified or Unsupported that have gold status or better on ProtonDB. The article doesn't mention this, but I imagine for the average person, Valve's own ratings are far more relevant.

OTOH ProtonDBs ratings can be a bit generous, it's not uncommon to see Gold/Platinum rated games with comments detailing the command line incantations or unofficial Proton forks they had to apply to get it to work, and sometimes there's still minor issues. The official ratings mean it really just works out of the box.

There are a lot of games that are marked broken on Steam Deck that work fine.

On the flip side, there are some games that are marked verified that aren't... exactly playable. They run fine, but they weren't designed for controllers (which IMO should affect the rating, given that they mark down more trivial issues like small text or needing the on screen keyboard to enter a name once).

The best part is that every game that runs on the Steam Deck will run on any Linux desktop.

I’ve hit a few counterexamples. Is there a good way to escalate bugs for them?

(Most of the issues are in GPU firmware, fwiw.)

Look for an open issue for the game in question under here[0]. If one exists, add your report to it. If not, open a new one.

[0] https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton/issues

IME, it’s more a mixed bag. Some games run great on Linux or within Proton. Others seem to be more Steam Deck focused and as such, require more fiddling to get it to work.

If you’re using Nvidia you’re definitely going to have a harder time. AMD GPUs are the path of least resistance.

Edit: Also, avoid the Steam flatpak if you want maximum compatibility, sometimes it has issues. I stick with the official .deb package.

Which my gaming PC has. I went from Windows 11, Ubuntu Latest and back to Windows 11.

Sorry, which one does your PC have?

But yeah, the Nvidia situation is a bummer. Hopefully NVK will do for Nvidia users what the open source amdgpu driver did for AMD users.

It's RTX 4070 Ti

Have you tried the GE fork? I’ve found some things just won’t work with vanilla proton with my Nvidia card.

https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

I'm done. I hate Windows 11 but my PC works with it installed so I'll just deal with Windows 11 minor bullshit vs fighting Proton and Nvidia.

care to share any examples? your experience is the opposite of mine. I've been using the steam deck status as a shorthand for Linux support for a little while and if anything I've gotten a few games running that aren't supported, not the other way around.

I have an AMD card though, because I always check Linux compatibility before buying hardware..

Here's the list of games playable on Deck but generally not Linux https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=fixWanted&selectedFilt...

"every game". That's not true. You're confusing the two different badges Steam uses. One is the native Linux support badge. The other is the Steam Deck verified badge, meaning their custom build of Proton, and custom OS, and hardware specific compatibility fixes have made the (usually Windows native) game playable. It's a good sign for other Linux users, but even if you get the newest version of generic Proton and use Arch Linux and an AMD GPU, you're not going to be able to play every game that Deck can play. The community and valve engineers are giving the Deck the most attention for fixes.

Do you have an example of a game that only runs on steam deck and nothing else?

"and nothing else" - I just want to point out I never said this. My point was that there are thousands of combinations of linux distros, hardware models, and proton versions/settings, so just because it works on the super-popular combo doesn't mean it works on all. But here is a list of Deck Verified games with a lot of frustrated Linux users https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=fixWanted&selectedFilt...

Did a spot check of that list, and everything seems to be issues you'd run into on Steam Deck too - for what its worth.

I've been running linux as my main OS since 2018ish now - I've personally not ran into games like what you mentioned but IDK there definitely is some, but I don't think in titles people are going to be playing.

Been playing Steam games on Fedora and AMD GPU for over a year and haven't really run into any major issues. Never thought it would happen! I haven't booted into Windows in over six months

I wish I'd had the same experience, although I was using Pop not Fedora (based on some recommendations found online)

I installed a couple of games, found that the performance was maybe only 60% of what I got on Windows and had to go back.

I wish I could be linux only, but it just wasn't there for me.

Running a 6900XT too.

Were you using the Flatpak? Apparently the sandboxing introduces performance issues.

I can't remember, I gave it a go for a couple of days, switching between Win and Linux installs to make sure settings and the like where the same to be fair.

In the end perf was bad, so wiped that drive and now it has more games on it.

I've been on Bazzite for a few months on my machine (7800 XT) with Windows on a secondary partition. Of the games I've tested Linux performance is identical, but Steam can precompile shaders in the background on Linux which eliminates compilation stutter.

And how is with Macos now? I see it is kinda supported, but ...

Give Whisky a shot. Yeah, it’s a 20 year old game, but I was able to get Half-Life 2 running at 1080p with all settings maxed on my Mac Mini. The only slow down I experienced was when a bunch of barrels exploded at the same time.

https://getwhisky.app/

Valve is the best thing that happened to Linux since Ubuntu.

I can count on one hand the number of games I've wanted to play on my steam deck and have been unable to.

If you play a lot of games and have the extra cash, a steam deck is a great buy. If you are into rougelikes/lites its probably the best possible setup imaginable. Being able to play a run or two on the couch or on a plane is incredible.

Valve >>>> FAANG or literally any other tech company.

How many of these run on Mac via Asahi Linux?

Hmm, does Asahi Linux translate between x86 / x64 and ARM layers (e.g., similar to Rosetta on MacOS)? If not, I can’t imagine it’s all that many.

(If Valve can somehow find a way to nail that, I imagine that’ll be a huge boon for portable PC gaming.)

Found answer: https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/

    FEX emulates x86 on Arm.
    Wine translates Windows to Linux.
    DXVK and vkd3d-proton translate DirectX to Vulkan.

Too bad I'm no longer young, my 16 year old self would have had a blast

What does age have to do with it?

Available time.

I can only speak to living in rural suburbia USA but when I was 15 my hobbies were severely limited by the lack of independence. No ability to drive, part-time employment, academic busywork and parental oversight severely curtailed the range of experiences I was able to enjoy. This somewhat continued into college as I had to spend breaks working full-time to pay for tuition and housing. In these types of circumstances video games are a great hobby because they're affordable social experiences that don't require travel.

Now that I'm fortunate enough to be liberated from these considerations I choose to do more expensive outgoing things like backpacking, going to festivals, trying new restaurants, biking, etc. I make occasional exceptions but these days I try and stay away from video games; it'll be easier to catch up on all the games that I missed when I'm retired in 30 years and don't feel like walking 20 miles in a weekend.

For sure I get that, and same. I mostly play games these days on Steam Deck as a wind-down activity that competes with reading a book or watching a YouTube video. It doesn’t complete with high energy activities anymore.

Video games don't charm me like they used to. Somewhere around college I logged into IRC and realized I like online socializing more than I like gaming.

Single player games are lonely. Multiplayer games are mostly competitive. Cooperative multiplayer is just socializing with busy-work added. And they usually demand an entire screen to themselves, when I would rather have a few windows open at once.

It's an indicator to the amount of time one has spent on coping and accepting the inconvenient truth about their past hobbies that they fervently lie to themselves and others about.

It's not a mystery to anybody else why they immediately switch interests after finally reaching stability to 'do the thing they've always wanted to have time to do' and glorified multiple years of their adolescence engaging in: they aren't interested in it as much anymore, or were never actually that interested in it. It's weird that they'll always be the last to figure it out.

I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say

I can't get immersed in games as much as I used to. I occasionally buy something on sale on Steam, play for 30 minutes and never touch it again.

I bought a Steam Deck because I'm no longer young. I could rave about the haptics and build quality, but honestly, I just like that I can tap a button and pick back up where I was weeks or months earlier.

Plus, it was $300 (on sale) for the first fully equipped computer built for Linux in a handheld form factor. Even if I barely use it, that's /cool/.

this is really good news!

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