All hands on Steam Deck - Valve's handheld PC

Speaking again as a Steam Deck owner, the various scripts people have made for adding non-Steam-game launchers to Steam mode are inconsistent at best, often requiring multiple attempts to get them working in the first place, and extensive tweaking after. In fact, getting anything that involves a Flatpak (as the emulator script and the Heroic script for EGS/GOG games both do) to run in Steam mode has been a consistently worse experience than running a non-Flatpak native Linux build, or even running the Windows version under Proton, as I ended up doing with MAME after running into endless problems with trying to use a Linux build.

Looks like that’s true and then some for Spider-Man, at “over 33 million” as of this year, but I found a lot of sources that were very careful to say “19.5 million” for God of War. Given that that was a year ago, I’m sure the $20 physical version and $10 PSN sales have gotten it that extra 500K, but it feels weird to not simply wait to announce the sales numbers until you hit that round number.

RDR2’s lifetime sales on all platforms as of May are around 44 million, so I find it unlikely at best that almost half of those were on PS4 alone. As for Cyberpunk, its lifetime sales on all platforms are less than 20 million.

Are they, though? Gabe said the price was painful but never said it was sold at a loss.

Profit isn’t painful

Making things up then, got it.

I placed the $5 deposit on July 16th 2021. I got the confirmation to complete my purchase last week on the 7th.

Sweet. My time is nigh!

Seems extremely likely actually. The rule of thumb for a multiplatform AAA game in the last gen was 50% on PS4, 25% each for PC and Xbox. (Maybe not so much these days, with PS4 being dead and PS5 being unavailable, which has been making the PC more attractive).

RDR2 in particular only came out on PC a year later. Even if it was late in the generation, it was either play on a console or don’t play it at all. So it should be skewed further to the consoles. (First year sales were 26M, so we’d expect about 17M PS4, 9M Xbox. It’s not plausible that they didn’t scrape together another 3M PS sales in 2.5 years since then.)

You’ll forgive me for not putting much stock in a “rule of thumb” based purely on conjecture, since no one releases actual per-platform sales info anymore.

Anyway, congrats to anyone getting their Steam Deck shipping notices for the current batch! Lately I’ve been using mine to play a fan-translated visual novel, a GBA emulator, and Tetris Effect, and aside from how fast TE drains the battery (and no, capping the framerate isn’t an option here, because of the nature of the design of modern Tetris), it’s been a fantastic time.

Unless Valve advertised it, there is no case, and the judge would eventually make them pay the fees for wasting everyone’s time. “Content creators” don’t have the time or money to fight it, Valve does. And, besides, there’s no lack of Nintendo console emulators on all sorts of devices, targeted at emulation or no, including emulator sales on Google Play.

It shipped! Theoretically it’ll be here Friday, but they used FedEx so hopefully by Thanksgiving.

The eagle have landed. I repeat, the eagle have landed.

XB1 Controller for reference

ugh it’s so beautiful

play Aperture Desk Job so you know how to use it and then get gaming!

Aperture desk job was hysterical. I’ve been watching a lot of Nate Bargatze on youtube and his performance was stellar.

Congrats!

That’s a wonderful size reference. it’s bigger than I thought it was!

That’s what she said.

So the deck feels REALLY good in your hands. I personally like it more than the Switch.

I haven’t tested the battery life yet but the games I play probably won’t strain the console regardless.

3 Week impression with Steam Deck (512):

This machine is god damn magical. Last Sunday, I had to fly to Milwaukee and back to pick up my son for the rest of the summer (he’s autistic). I spent plane/airport time playing solo Deep Rock Galactic, and this was an amazing experience being able to do this anywhere. I’ve had zero performance problems with games I’ve tried (ok, GOG’s Cyberpunk install runs a little shakey, but apparently I can fix this).

Outside of Steam games I’ve also added old console emulators, Minecraft, and Xbox Cloud gaming, Really happy I got this device. My Switch has been collecting dust since it arrived.

Yup, it’s an absolute game changer. PUN INTENDED!

Epic and GOG also pair well with it when you install Heroic Game Launcher. Then you add Heroic Game Launcher as a “non-Steam game” to Steam and can fire them up from there.

Is there a good wiki or getting started article? I’ve figured out how to download steam games, but that’s about it.