Valve's popular handheld gaming PC recently passed 14,200 officially rated games, meaning there's never been a better time to own one.
This is just talking about games approved through Valve's verification process. There are a lot of games that work that are "unverified", not to mention the entire history of gaming available through emulation.
It plays way more than that, I play all sorts of "unsupported" games all the time - mostly they run fine or even great (never mind all the emulators lol)
I have not even begun to fuck with games outside of Steam yet. My backlog of stuff I want to play is insane. I probably could not play through even just the fully supported games before I died, never mind all the other stuff.
Given that compatibility improvements can essentially only be expected from Ryujinx now though, does Ryujinx run as well as Yuzu on the Deck? Ideally I'd like to switch to it entirely unless a viable Yuzu successor emerges, but I've heard that it's not as resource efficient in comparison.
In my opinion it's not "as good" as yuzu, for now. That said it still runs about anything I throw at it, but yuzu did it better with higher frame rates.
Yuzu is better overall, but Ryujinx works weirdly better for certain games. Like, Mario Wonder runs about 40% better for me on Ryujinx for some reason.
It has some value as a comparison, some people might be worried about buying a deck because they've heard that some games don't work on it because of linux. But no one would think the Switch is lacking in games.
I dont see why not. Especially with the switch 2 coming out eventually, I think the value proposition of the deck goes up for consumers who might want to make a choice
Well I think neither of the numbers mean much since in my opinion a majority of those games on both systems are just slop. So the numbers of available games is irrelevant to anything to me. It would be like stating or bragging about how many words can be made from the alphabet.
I wanted to buy a switch for the longest time, but after Nintendo being cunts, I will buy the deck and simply emulate any and all Nintendo games. They don't deserve any less
The steam deck library includes the entire switch library via emulation, so Yeah Obviously. (Ik they're not counting emulation, but my point is that the steam deck is a PC, which makes it much more versatile)
They just talk about Steam games that were verified by Valve's process. So yeah, as you said, it's much larger for people who are willing to do a tiny bit of tinkering 👍
@Fubarberry My one wish is they (Valve, Nintendo, etc.) could make discovery easier and more useful. It takes a lot of effort finding new games to play that aren't the usual major releases and obvious indie titles.
I'll check those out. I've been doing the "steam discovery queue" for awhile now though, and it feels like if you do it enough you won't ever miss anything of interest. I think it can work pretty well for game discovery, you just need to invest some time in it every day to get through all the more "common" recommendations.
Steam has a built in discovery queue that contains a list of games it thinks you might like (and it it infinite, so it technically contains every game on the platform)
To be fair, some of the mobile ports are improved with controller support added to them. It's just frustrating that some of them aren't subsequently ported to PC as well.
According to this website, there are about 11k switch games. There are some duplicates on that list though, games which have multiple "editions" will have an entry under each version. For example, Xenoblade Chronicles DE is listed 4 times to cover different regional collectors editions.
I like the Deck, but lately been using my Switch again because I like the battery life and the smaller form factor sometimes. I hope Valve releases a Deck that is a little easier to slip into a bag and that can do a bit better than 1.5-2.5 hours of battery life.
I’ll still use my Deck, but in some cases where the same game I want is available on Switch and I am traveling, I will choose the Switch for its form factor.
For me, I have come to appreciate switch lite form factor to be honest. I like the deck too but its too bulky for me personally. I fucking love vita and 3ds lite but small size has it cons such as underpowered cpu, battery etc but damn it i like it fit enough on most pocket and easily slid into bag.
Battery life seems a tad low unless you're playing somewhat demanding games. The Steam Deck does have some power optimization settings you can use to up your battery life, and you can set them on a per-game basis. I haven't played with them myself, but I think they're in the menu that comes up with the ... Button on the right side.
That difference seems far lower than I would have guessed.
Oh. The "verified" status accounts for the difference. That's fair.
My initial mental math was including unverified Indie games I already bought for my PC, most of which happen to work perfectly.
I expect that difference to go up fast over the next few years as more indie devs discover that they don't actually need to change many of their old games to get verified.
Yeah, even the "playable" tag i have to check what they mean by that. Psychonauts 1 and 2 are "playable" but both need you to manually pull up the keyboard and show xbox controls... Like okay? That's all? They play perfectly.
I also downloaded an indie game "tonight we riot" and its not even tested. Want to geuss how well it plays? Spoiler, perfectly fine.
I'm genuinely greatful for steam personally pushing for more games to work well in linux even if the game needs a compatibility layer like Wine or proton.
It doesn’t matter that much as long as Nintendo switch is considered more cool for general public which it still is due to deck being kinda black and nerdish
Is deck objectively better? Sure but the power of social conformity is near limitless as we can see from apple stock valuation