I was wrong about (aspects of) The Steam Deck?!
I saw Fan the Deck's video about how he was wrong about certain aspects of the Steam Deck, and I was totally inspired by that video to talk about how I was wrong about certain aspects of the Steam Deck as well, mostly predictions. These are a list of some of my L's:
Anti-Cheat
For those not in the know, sometime in 2021, Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye partnered up with Valve to bring their anti-cheat solutions to Linux and, by extension, the Steam Deck. Prior to this announcement, you could count the number of EAC and BattlEye games played on Linux on one hand, probably. Valve made it sound so easy, and I even read the Steamworks page on this whole anti-cheat stuff, and they made it sound really easy there too. Apparently, it's just a matter of copying some files and flipping a switch, right? And apparently, in the case of BattlEye, you only needed to email your BattlEye rep. Sounds easy, right? Well, obviously, nothing's ever as easy as it seems, and I, too, hate backseat devs who claim that X or Y is easy when they aren't. My prediction was fairly simple: I believed that smaller titles with anti-cheats would take up this opportunity to enable their anti-cheats for SteamOS.
Destiny 2
I firmly believed that Destiny 2 would be playable on the Steam Deck on SteamOS. There was only one "piece of evidence," if you could call it that - it's still found in Bungie's API. If you look at light.gg introduced during the Season of the Splicer (Season 14 of Destiny 2), it's an emblem that looks like a proton, and it's called "Portable Power." I mean, come on, what else could that be referring to? I asked the Lord Daddies of Destiny 2, and I got no response. Period. Unfortunately, Bungie went in the opposite direction of what I was expecting. Bungie not only did not enable Steam Deck support, but they outright said that they would not support Steam Deck unless you had Windows installed. What a massive bummer. For real, I've never felt so betrayed, so wronged. Despite the fact that Bungie never outright said that they would support the Steam Deck, I don't know, I just felt so betrayed.
The Verification System
For a time, I certainly believed that the verification system that Valve put down would be the end-all-be-all of compatibility, you know, outside of using Proton DB to get unsupported games working. Turns out, there are numerous flaws in the verification system. There could be any number of reasons for this happening, but of course, at the end of the day, it's all Valve's responsibility.
God of War should not be Steam Deck Verified when it will hard crash the Steam Deck.
— GamingOnLinux 🐧⭐ (@gamingonlinux) January 22, 2023
I agree; a game shouldn't have this many stability issues if it's marked as verified by Valve. The fact that God of War crashes the entire Steam Deck really makes it not worthy of being verified in my opinion. Sony ought to fix this issue because, at the end of the day, it's their game.
Of course, this isn't the only issue with the verification system. There are way more issues. The most difficult part about this whole thing is the fact that games change; heck, Proton itself changes as well. There are over 50,000 non-VR titles on Steam. Let's say Proton gets a substantial update. There would be games that would need to be tested again. Imagine potentially doubling the workload. My favorite example is DBZ Kakarot, a game that was tested in February of 2022. It was marked as unsupported, and I believe back then, the game straight-up did not work on Steam Deck. But now, the game works on Steam Deck perfectly with no tweaks too, if the Proton DB entries are to be believed. And yet, the game is still marked as unsupported.
There's also the fact that games do, in fact, get updates. Some get multiple DLCs, and some get quality-of-life updates. But then you have the multiplayer juggernauts that get multiple different updates throughout their entire lifespan. Is Valve going to have to test every single time a game gets an update? I would hope not, right?"
Switch Emulation
I was a skeptic and back then, I didn't believe that the Steam Deck would be capable of emulating the Switch. I always figured it would be just a meme. But I was wrong, it has become an ascended meme. Switch games can be emulated at playable frame rates. Now, to be fair, some of the more high-end Switch games still don't run great on Steam deck. But you have games like Mario Odyssey running fairly well on Steam deck. Furthermore, there's no telling how much better games could run in the future. Developers for emulators like Real Jinx and Yuzu are always optimizing and making games run better and better. But for Breath of the Wild, definitely play the Wii U version. I've even got a guide for modding the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild on Steam deck.
AAA Capabilities
Another thing I got wrong, like many people, was the Steam deck's AAA capabilities. I firmly believed that this device would not be capable of playing AAA titles, at least not that well. I certainly wasn't expecting to be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 at all. But you can run Cyberpunk at playable frame rates, more than playable frame rates if I do say so myself. And all of this was before the Steam deck preset updates and the FSR2 updates. In fact, most of the AAA titles I've played on my Steam deck, I haven't touched on my main PC at all. Yeah, sure, I'm not playing these games at max settings on 1440p at over 100 FPS. But you know what? I don't miss any of that when I play AAA titles on my Steam deck. Of course, this is just AAA titles of today. That said, recently there was a string of modern AAA releases that run poorly on Steam deck. Games like Forespoken, Returnal, Wild Hearts. Some of these games do have issues on PC as well, but these issues are more prevalent on Steam deck due to the fact that, well, the Steam deck isn't like a super top-of-the-line modern gaming PC.
Deck as a Target System to Optimize For
I thought that more developers would actively target the Steam Deck beyond just making sure the game runs on it. My thought process was very simple: aside from storage capacity, most unmodified Steam Decks have the same hardware - the same processor, the same amount of RAM, and the same RAM speeds. In theory, this makes the Steam Deck more akin to a console. I mean, every PS5 performs the same, right? My thought was that developers would actively target the Steam Deck as it would be the new baseline for what a low-end PC could be. At its absolute minimum, target the Steam Deck and scale your way up. That was my reasoning. But of course, I'm not a game developer, so my thoughts weren't very rooted in reality. Not to mention, game development can take multiple years, and it's very possible that games just weren't being developed with the Steam Deck in mind because the Steam Deck only came out last year.
Regions
When the Steam Deck was first announced and released, only people in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe could get Steam Decks (not including imports, of course). They've since expanded into certain Asian countries, such as Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. I totally thought that none of these other regions would be getting Steam Decks until after the first anniversary of the Steam Deck. To be fair, though, there are still several regions that don't have access to Steam Decks yet, like Southeast Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America, just to name a few. I do hope in the future Valve does sell the Steam Deck to these countries, preferably within the year.
Backlog Killing
I touted that I would be using my Steam Deck to clear out my backlog. And to be fair, I've tried out a bunch of games in my library that I probably would not have otherwise. I've even catalogued a good portion of my Steam library on YouTube in a series I called "Steam Deck Library Check," which I will be restarting soon. And yes, I have beaten some games that have just been sitting in my library for quite some time now. But if I had to be real with you, I think my backlog may have gotten worse. Nowadays, I buy more and more games on Steam than I have before, and my backlog keeps growing. There's no end to this, is there? Cleaning out your backlog requires some true discipline, the will to stop buying new games as they get released.
SD Cards for PC games
While the Nintendo Switch, 3DS, and even some modifications for the PS Vita use SD cards, running AAA titles off an SD card on a full PC sounded like madness to me. What's even more surprising is just how well it works. Games on SD cards perform similarly to games installed on SSDs, though obviously load times are longer on an SD card. I did not expect the difference in load times to be just seconds, not minutes. Storing shader cache on the SSD is important for performance when downloading a lot of games onto an SD card. Overall, I am surprised at the level of performance running games off an SD card on the Steam Deck, but this can be attributed to how Steam does shader caching and compatibility data. However, I do not expect the same level of performance if trying to do this on Windows.
Collecting Dust
I bought the Steam Deck with the expectation that I would play it for a few months and then let it collect dust. To this day, I still play games on my Steam Deck, and it's my preferred way of playing games. Almost every game I play on PC, I play on my Steam Deck, with the occasional exception being Destiny 2. I made a video about how the Steam Deck ruined PC gaming for me, which was an exaggeration, but it has changed how I view PC gaming as a whole. I will still upgrade my gaming PC and partake in custom water cooling, but the Steam Deck's amazingness and the outrageous GPU prices make me appreciate that PC gaming is no longer being held back by increasing GPU prices year after year.
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