So Gabe Newell’s company has a titanic task in order to solve them and increase compatibility with the different games that exist on the Steam platform in order to increase the value.
Let’s not forget that the Steam Deck is a paradox in itself, since, on the one hand, it is a console and on the other it is based on PC games, which leads to a situation that is at least curious, due to the fact that that computer games are not optimized for a closed system in terms of hardware. In other words, its technical specifications do not change over time, which goes against the way the market works.
We must bear in mind that the console, in order to be able to move PC games, uses an interpreter, Proton, which translates the calls to the system of games for Steam under Windows to the operating system of the Valve console based on Linux. However, this decision assumes that not all games are supported and not all games that are are working at 100% and with maximum performance.
Valve upgrades its Steam Deck to Proton 7
It is because of that Valve has updated the Proton interpreter to version 7. which among other things includes full support for AMD’s van Gogh APU, which is the one that Valve uses in their Steam Deck. This has increased game compatibility and increased the number of games that are supported on Linux under that interpreter, including the following:
- Year 1404
- Call of Juarez
- DCS World Steam Edition
- Disgaea 4 Complete+
- Dungeon Fighters Online
- Epic Roller Coasters XR
- eternal return
- ForzaHorizon 5
- Gravity Sketch VR
- monster hunter rise
- NecroVisionN
- Nights of Azure
- Oceanhorn: Monsters of the Uncharted Seas
- Order of War
- Person 4 Gold
- Resident Evil 0
- Resident Evil Revelations 2
- Rocksmith 2014 edition
- SCP: Secret Laboratory
- wargroove
- wartales
- Yakuza 4 Remastered
It is expected that the list of compatible games will continue to grow over time and little by little the already compatible games will work much better and more and more will be added over time to the list of games that can be played on Valve’s console. However, the problems of the Steam Deck in terms of compatibility will continue to exist, at least until the developers do not make optimized versions of their games for the system.
Apart from compatibility improvements, also added improved anti-cheat in Proton 7 in order to avoid problems in online games. Although at the moment Valve keeps many of them out of the list of compatible games. Let’s not forget that Proton 7 is not just for Valve’s Steam Deck, but for Linux users in general looking to play Windows games without having to install Redmond’s OS.
Urgent native games on Steam Deck
However, despite the use of Proton 7, the ideal would be for these to be native to Steam OS and, therefore, the interpreter would not be necessary. So the best thing would be for developers to program their games natively for Steam OS. Although his work to get games to run under the best conditions on Steam OS would not be limited to that.
For example, they would also make use of a performance analyzer so that the graphic configuration is the most appropriate to achieve the perfect balance between image quality, resolution and frames per second. Nor can we forget the use of precompiled shaders for the platform, a common trick of closed hardware such as consoles to gain frames by downloading said task to the CPU.
Optimizations on games already released on the market are not difficult to do and relatively cheap, the problem is that this is done in conversions of existing games on new platforms. What makes these, when sold at full price, end up being very profitable. However, Valve can’t sell such updates if they don’t want to turn people against it and will have to convince the various developers to make optimizations for their newly released and fledgling hardware.
