Valve posted a new blog where they recapped the first month of release, confirming over 2000 games are Steam Deck verified.
“It’s been exciting to see the variety of games the community has been playing – new or old, big or small, every genre – it seems like players have been having a ton of fun on Deck”, Valve said in the update. “We’re going to continue charging through the Steam catalog and can’t wait to share the next big milestone here.”
The news that over 2000 games are Steam Deck verified comes from Valve’s new system of the same name, which lets game developers to submit their games to be tested for their overall compatibility with Steam Deck hardware and controls.
Chief in the new additions brought to Steam in the month since Gabe Newell personally delivered the first Steam Deck units included a fix for analog stick drift, as well as user feedback on Steam Deck Verified rating. So, if a game actually plays poorly even though it was fully verified for the Deck, you can vote.
Valve also talked up the ongoing concern of games unplayable on Steam Deck due to their limits with anti-cheat, confirming they’ve now implemented a process for them to have them fully running in Steam, and with anti-cheat still running.
“The two biggest anti-cheat services, BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat, now have a streamlined path for developers that choose to enable support for Proton and Steam Deck. Elden Ring and Apex Legends are two examples of games which are taking advantage of this work, so far,” Valve said.
Valve also talked up new SteamOS updates like the dual trackpad typing and various on-screen keyboard themes. They also improved navigating through that ridiculously large Steam library most of you have and never play through.
“We’ve spent some time making the Steam Store more responsive and snappier on Deck”, Valve said. “Plus we get that navigating through libraries can be unwieldy if you have a ton of games, so we’ve made it easier with fast scrolling. We’ve also added the ability to create dynamic collections within your library based on tags and other game characteristics.”
Valve also talked up their focus on improving battery life, as Steam Deck is made to be a very portable gaming PC after all, noting battery life is “always high on our list.” To that they added the ability to drop the game’s framerate to 15FPS so you can conserve battery life.
The company noted “this setting works great for visual novels, puzzles and a lot of simulation games,” and that they also added lots of other fine tune battery saver tweaks like TDP (processor power limits), GPU clock speed, and FSR (screen scaling).
Lastly, while Valve already rolled out official Windows drivers for Steam Deck, they further reiterated they’re working with hardware partners like AMD to get a full suite of hardware drivers for those that want to run Windows on the Deck, for whatever reason.
Here’s a video recap of all the new features and tweaks they’ve rolled out in the first month:
Valve’s recently launched Steam Deck is now available, and in three flavors: $399 (64GB), $529 (256GB), and $649 (512GB), over on the Steam store.
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