Steam Deck recently celebrated its first year on the market and it can already be said that Valve’s console is being a success restrained, but success at the end of the day. And, as with any gaming device worth its salt, its success is largely based on its catalogue. Something delicate in the case at hand, as you probably already know.
And it is that Steam Deck is a console, but one based on a generic platform such as the PC, to make matters worse, with Linux as the operating system. Of course, if Steam Deck relied solely on the catalog available for Linux, it would hardly have settled as it has. Not because the number of native Linux games on Steam is small, but because many of the great titles that drive users along are missing.
The secret behind Steam Deck -and, for that matter, Steam for Linux- is called Proton or Steam Play, a Wine-based compatibility layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux with plenty of guarantees. Such is the quality that this compatibility has reached, thanks in large part to the impulse that Steam Deck has brought, that its catalog does not differentiate between native or “emulated” games (it is not an emulation as such, but to understand each other ).
As we have explained on more than one occasion, Steam Deck distinguishes between compatible games between “verified” and “playable”the first being those that, in addition to working correctly, are adapted to offer the best experience on Steam Deck, while the second have been tested and work well, but may cause some problem or not be well adapted to the screen and controls of the device. device.
Added to the previous ones, there are two more categories in terms of games and the Steam Deck: those that are not supported, titles that have been tested and that do not work well -generally, due to explicit impediments by the publishers- do not work and the bulk of the Steam catalog , which is yet to be tested. Ergo, the Steam Deck catalog must actually be much larger than what is officially and unofficially acknowledged.
The last time we published an update about it was when Steam Deck marked a figure as round and forceful as 5,000 supported games. More than half a year has passed since this, but if we haven’t kept up with the account, it’s because we haven’t been making too much noise. The next one will be when the console doubles that figure and reaches 10,000 compatible games, for which there isn’t that much left (they go for 8,000-odd compatible titles).
However, and as we have also repeated other times, the important thing about a catalog is not only the quantity. Without quality there is nothing and that is what Valve has focused on since the launch of the Steam Deck. The most obvious example is that more games are compatible with Linux than with Steam Deck, even though if they work well on one, they will almost certainly work on the other as well. In this regard, there are no complaints.
According to what they collect on Boling Steam, 75% of the 100 most popular games on Steam can be played on the Steam Decka certainly optimistic percentage that is distributed as follows:
- 26 are verified games.
- 47 are playable games.
- 24 are unsupported games.
- 3 are games for which there is no data.
Note that a couple of years ago we echoed similar news, but focused on Proton support for Linux. Then the percentage of the hundred most popular games was 80%, but since then it has rained a lot and things have changed for the better, although the number suggests otherwise. Basically, Effort is being put into improving quality of the execution of the most popular games that are coming out.
As an example, we recently published an article with 10 triple-A titles that you can play on the Steam Deck, but there are even more specific ones. Two striking examples are those of Elden Ring either Hogwarts Legacy two almost instantaneous hits whose receiving on Steam Deck was, in the same way, almost instantaneous, offering an experience whose quality has been improving with each new version of Proton.
