I personally have a huge backlog of games I’m happily playing through on the deck. And, having been burnt a few times (Cyberpunk, No Mans Sky …), I very rarely buy new full priced games anyway (better to wait for a discount and some patches!)
But according to this rather clickbate article …
In the last month alone, we’ve seen three disappointing examples of games that are too demanding for the Deck. Star Wars Outlaws is unplayable on Low settings, even with FSR set to “Ultra Performance.” Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 can’t reach a steady 30fps at the lowest quality setting. And based on the demo, Final Fantasy 16 is unplayable without FSR and Frame Generation, and afflicted with stuttering and horrible frame pacing with those scaling features enabled.
I agree with you, handheld can never compete with a desktop when it comes to raw power. So, if companies don’t consider it as a platform to target for, you’ll always have problem with latest games. Maybe not at launch, but you can’t upgrade a handheld “console” every year or two.
That’s the good thing about consoles, you buy it, and you know (most of) the games that come to the platform will just run on it.
I don’t have a SteamDeck so not sure how it works, but maybe they should make a sub-store for SteamDeck, that only has games that are verified to run on it. They can still have an option to search and download game from full steam store, but it should come as a warning that these games aren’t specifically made / optimized for Deck.
Just thinking out loud. Don’t actually know what SteamDeck owners really want. :-)
That is how it sort of works the steam store displays the games the games that work with the deck. You can install other games but you get the a warning that either it has not been testet enough to make sure that it works, or that it is not recommend because that issues with the deck.
I think, that the steam deck is popular enough, so that it can be treated as a console, were you make special “ports” of your game, which has it default settings adjusted for that console (and maybe some other patches to make stuff work)
But maybe this is just wishful thinking 🤔