Posts by Tag / TOPIC: Steam Deck (3)

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Steam Deck and new AAA games

When I bought a Steam Deck, I wasn’t too concerned about its specs or compatibility with new stuff. As a rule, I don’t exactly rush to play the latest AAA releases. But sometimes I want to play a newish big-ticket game that happens to be significantly worse on Steam Deck.

Sonic Frontiers was one of those games. It’s perfectly playable on the Deck and the graphical issues didn’t get in the way of the experience I wanted, but they did make me laugh when I saw that there was a photo mode.

I do love it when games allow for creative expression that you can capture as persistent play artifacts, but it’s hard to get excited about setting up photo ops when the platform I’m on means the resulting image will cap out at 720p with limits on draw distance and texture quality and possible glitches.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen often enough that it would be remotely worth buying a new gaming PC or current-gen console, but it happens enough to be annoying. It’s another reason to hope that the Steam Deck keeps doing well and becomes a widely-targeted platform by the AA and AAA studios and not just the indies.

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So I got my Steam Deck

Things I have done to prep my Steam Deck for playing games:

  • Combed my library, especially my evergreen favorites and my high-priority backlog, for compatible games and installed them, including gigantic AAA titles my previous gaming computer wasn’t fancy enough to run.
  • Leaned on ProtonDB to find even more compatible games than those verified by Valve and installed those too.
  • Bought an SD card to triple my Deck’s storage to hold all these games.
  • Installed EmuDeck to expand my library even further.

Games I have actually played on my Steam Deck:

Regrets:

  • None
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Valve’s Steam Deck makes a brilliant case against walled gardens

Valve’s Steam Deck makes a brilliant case against walled gardens Link preview image

Rather than boxing you into its own store, Valve’s portable gaming system lets you install software from anywhere, and it’s glorious.

Site iconFast Company — Jun 17, 2022 at 5:14 AM

We can argue all we want about the relative merits of closed versus open systems and so on, but it’s rare that this actually persuades any decision-makers. What they pay attention to is what’s been shown to make money. So it’s exciting that Valve is out here betting pretty big on releasing the Steam Deck as an open system and that they seem to be having success with it so far. If that success continues, then maybe the Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/Apples of the world will start to take notice.

It’s also an interesting lesson on productization and marketing. All these unusual capabilities of the Steam Deck are really nothing new and have been available on general computers for quite a while. But by presenting the Steam Deck as primarily a Switch-like hybrid games handheld/console with buttons and analog sticks, giving it an approachable works-out-of-the-box setup and configuration, and pricing it affordably, it targets a new audience and is suddenly seen as a direct competitor in what had previously seemed like a different market.