is the steam deck download and play like a console?

[cmccue1994]

does it require a lot of tinkering even to play deck verified and playable games, or for those games is it download and play like a console?

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

Games that has green ✔️ for deck verified, should be download & play. If for any reason not working, can use older versions of proton, or community fork GE proton.

Games that has❗mark, or has no display of deck verified, you have to see what works for proton version, or asking in the community. There site can check if others reported how things works for them via protondb.com pay attention to date, and version they use with their report, as not everyone returns to make another try on the game after awhile so chances may had fix it in future proton versions.

For games saying does not support Steam deck likely have reason such as dev chooses not want to make the effort which you can see if you can run it via proton, but games that rely on anti cheat like Easy Anti Chear *EAC* may not work, and prevent you from either launching, or playing the game.

Hope this helps. And yes steam store haves a category for steam deck ready.

[Kargor]

Originally posted by cmccue1994:

does it require a lot of tinkering even to play deck verified and playable games, or for those games is it download and play like a console?

Depends. For starters, the Deck still runs PC games, so it suffers from the same "options craze". Not all games do that, though.

Also, one of the possible checkboxes that Valve might tick is "The game runs well with the default graphics configuration" (or something along those lines). While, technically, this focuses on "graphics" specifically, there usually isn't much else that needs that amount of tinkering.

Last but not least, the "deck verified" only covers a limited number of games; for games that are not covered, all bets are off and you are hit with the full might of "linux gaming" -- trying different proton versions, trying different settings, or it might not run at all.

Also, I don't think Valve re-tests all the previously tested games when they make updates -- so it's possible that previous verdicts might not be true anymore. This, of course, can work in both directions -- a game that didn't work well might now work much better, or a game that worked just fine is now broken. I don't even know whether they give you the Proton version that they tested the game with, so you could just go back to that one.

So, there's always a bit of a gamble. The PC market can't really produce a *completely* worry-free experience like the consoles can since the hardware just varies too much, and using Linux doesn't exactly help either. Still, "Deck verified" should help, but in the long run, it might also be rather limiting.