I’m surprised the difference isn’t much higher, but I guess there’s a ton of shovelware on the Switch.
It is much higher. Those are just the officially approved numbers. You can get a lot more games than that working though. Most will probably run out of the box anyway, or with just slight tinkering, assuming the performance of the Deck suffices of course. You may have to create custom control mappings though.
Yeah, a few examples from my own Deck include Rymdkapsel (works perfectly, not verified or marked as Chromebook Ready), Surviving Mars (playable, but not rated) and Turmoil (explicitly unsupported, but works fine).
it’s linux native tho
Doesn’t matter for how they’re measuring. None of those games are marked as either Verified or Playable by Valve, so they’re not included in these statistics, despite working fine on the Deck.
respectfully, how have you not seen the infinite rivers of shovelware on steam since they stopped vetting the store ~10 years ago?
I’d be surprised if many of those are verified for steam deck?
Yeah. They probably work fine on the deck too, but they can only verify so many games and those are low priority.
That seems to be the point being made by the person you replied to; the difference should be higher (in favor of the Steamdeck) because of the vast quantity available on Steam. The shovelware is precisely why it should be higher. I think they’re expressing surprise that the Switch even comes within the range it does, hence bringing up Switch shovelware as a possible source for this.
ah, i see, you’re probably right
Steam is the same way
It’s quite a lot more than that if you count all the titles that work but aren’t verified, I imagine!
Isn’t that comparison asinine? I mean… Yeah, no shit. One is a handheld PC and the other isn’t.
While the Steam Deck is technically a handheld PC, as a Linux enthusiast who’s tried to use the desktop mode for laptoppy things… No it isn’t.
It works in a pinch (well… Not for my job, but I also don’t expect Valve to put lxd into SteamOS), but the comparison to the Switch (which I also own) is much better than comparing it to even a gaming laptop. In fact, if I were the type of person to emulate stuff (which, don’t worry Nintendo, I totally am not), I would say my Steam Deck makes a better switch than my switch. If I’d emulated a Switch to play Mario Kart (which obviously I haven’t) I’d say it was a better experience on my Steam Deck than on my switch.
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What I’m saying is that the PC comparison simply misses the point, whereas the Switch comparison is a comparison of how the devices are intended to be used (and for the most part actually used). The Steam Deck is not a good device for running a development environment or most of the things one thinks of as “PC tasks.” It’s not designed for that.
One can use it in that way, but one of the biggest differences between the Steam Deck and its “more pc-ish” competitors like the Ally is that Valve has done a lot of work to make desktop mode unnecessary for the vast majority of users. The user experience puts it much more directly in competition with the Switch than with other handheld PCs, and that’s a strength of the Deck, not a weakness.
One can install Linux on a Switch too, at which point it’s basically an ARM-based handheld PC. But a reviewer who reviewed the Switch for its power as a handheld Linux machine would be missing the point too.
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If it’s “just a handheld PC,” how do I setup cups as a service that starts on boot?
The answer: as a minimal change I have to enter developer mode and understand that the next update will wipe that away. (If I want to use it for this purpose regularly, it’d be better to install another OS, at which point you might as well call the Switch a handheld PC too.) This is a limitation of the Deck, but it’s a very intentional one. It’s a gaming appliance first and foremost, which makes the comparison to other gaming appliances apropos.
Are “Steam Deck has X many games that Valve have certified on it, up from Y 17 minutes ago” articles particularly useful? Only really to people who are using them for ad revenue. But that doesn’t make the comparison to the Switch a bad one. In fact, comparing the Steam Deck to the Switch is a better comparison than comparing it to a gaming desktop.
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I don’t want to argue the semantics of whether or not it is a handheld PC
And yet that’s exactly what you’re doing, and missing the forest for the trees as you do so…
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More like 129% considering I can play all the Switch games on a Deck.
As an owner of the Switch (with a huge backlog) and a dreaming owner of the Steam Deck, should I be happy or worried about the backlog?
Hey, at least your purchase is transferred!
That’s an embarrassingly small number of games for a PC… a PC should have access to far more games than that. I’m sure that’s just the “verified” games, but it’s pretty dumb to flaunt it like it’s something impressive.
Ugh! We don’t want larger games! We want more games!
Though both have a shit ton of shovelware garbage
