Also I can emulate a steamdeck on my desktop without being sued!
And also, whenever the next one comes along that library will still be there
Every other console you have the concept of “backwards compatibility” as a feature rather than an expectation.
To be fair that’s because software on consoles is designed for specific hardware. With newer hardware the old games won’t just work, because they were complex for very specific hardware. So for BC you end up with emulation which requires a lot more processing power than the original hardware, and is not perfect.
Or using the old hardware like the PlayStation 3 BC for instance, they literally had the PS2 hardware in the PS3 to handle BC. And as time went on they removed that hardware to save costs and BC went with it.
PC gaming however, and by extension portables like the Steam Deck however are running software developed more generically for wider ranges of architecture to begin with. It means less hardware optimization, but it generally means compatibility out of the box as hardware improves since it wasn’t designed with extremely specific hardware anyway.
This is less true since the PS4/XB1 era, since it’s just pretty standard x86 hardware, much like a PC. Although it may still apply to the Switch if they go in a different direction for the Switch 2.
thats if the switch 2 isnt still just standard arm hardware, much like a phone.
That’s an embarrassingly small number of games for a PC… a PC should have access to far more games than that. I’m sure that’s just the “verified” games, but it’s pretty dumb to flaunt it like it’s something impressive.
Definitely just verified, the actual number is easily triple that.
Not to mention even tons of unsupported games work perfectly fine.
And then there’s emulation
I’m surprised the difference isn’t much higher, but I guess there’s a ton of shovelware on the Switch.
It is much higher. Those are just the officially approved numbers. You can get a lot more games than that working though. Most will probably run out of the box anyway, or with just slight tinkering, assuming the performance of the Deck suffices of course. You may have to create custom control mappings though.
Slight tinkering and slight annoyances. Like some text is hard to read or unreadable, button/key prompts are wrong. Frame limiting being wonky, sound glitches. But all in all still amazing to be able to play your stuff on the go.
Yup. I’ve just been purchasing games without the Verified tag now because I’ll just be like: “yeah that seems like it’d work and it typically does”.
I made the mistake of installing Stardew Valley on it for 1.6. Oof, I’m playing it everywhere. Very bad when you can’t handle your addictions well.
As an owner of the Switch (with a huge backlog) and a dreaming owner of the Steam Deck, should I be happy or worried about the backlog?
Yes
As a Lenovo Go user that can access both worlds this is an interesting article to see where I stand in terms of overall access to games. But shouldn’t a Steamdeck have more titles? As far as I know you can’t you also side install Windows for games from other platforms?
This is just steam titles in the verified program. Protondb has 21k steam games that are reported working, and there’s also non-steam games and emulation.
