now
I mean, it did day one. This is a non article.
Well, not technically. At the start the number of “Verified” games was below the Switch, but recently even that surpassed it, iirc. And “Playable” has been higher for a while now.
It plays PC games. Obviously it “has” more games than the Switch. It has more than Xbox and PS, too.
My laptop also “has” more games than the Switch.
The point was that not every game was confirmed to work. For a PC game to work on the Steamdeck, it needs to meet two criteria:
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Work on Linux, either natively or through Proton.
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Have controller support and/or be playable with a touchscreen.
Not every PC game meets this criteria. Some games still don’t play well in a cross-OS runtime environment like Proton or WINE. Others are designed specifically for mouse and keyboard, or keyboard alone.
One game I can definitely say is not Steamdeck compatible is SimCity 4. The UI doesn’t really work with touch screens well, the game has no native controller support, and it originally released with SecuROM so a physical copy won’t even work on modern Windows, let alone Linux.
It wasn’t guaranteed that all or even most of them would work Day 1, while most of them work well enough for us, they might not work well enough for the average person who isn’t familiar with re-configuring incompatible games to work properly. The thing that has changed is that many of the games became verified as they were tested and as Valve put out updates to fix incompatibilities.
Quantity /= Quality But sometimes quantity is a quality of its own.
So, only about half the average steam users backlog…
Can we stop bullying the little kid console? Grow up console should be better than that.
not to mention that it can emulate the entire switch library as well