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.
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.
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:
Work on Linux, either natively or through Proton.
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.
Fair, but at that point you’re arguing a technicality that most people don’t really care about.
And if you want to argue technicalities, then I CAN give you a game that was released for the Steam Deck by YOUR definition. Aperture Desk Job. Yes, it can be played by PCs as well, but it was developed with the intent of it being a showcase of the Steam Deck’s controls. You can’t argue it “wasn’t a Steam Deck” game if your definition of whether a game was for a certain platform is based on whether it was intended for that platform.
Not going to downvote you this time because you actually explained your position. Though your tone VERY much tempted me to do so anyway.
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