You probably heard recently that Valve was readying up Steam Deck developer kits and now we can see that quite a lot of developers have received one. Not just the big lot either, developers of all sorts across the world seem to be getting them and showing them off.
The thing is that for it to be a success, you don't just want the top most played games working well - you want as many as possible across every genre that developers have managed to created. Valve is clearly aware of this of course and you can see that in who they've approved for a Steam Deck dev kit.
Here's a a little round-up bundle of developers / publishers that have been showing off their dev kits:
- James Schall of Secret Mode showing shots of Penko Park (they recently added full controller support).
- Sidney Just of X-Plane showing it running, while in an actual aeroplane. Also the official X-Plane account showing a shot of it at the beach.
- Hannah Gamiel of Cyan Worlds showing a couple of videos with games like Myst.
- Chet Faliszek (Ex Valve dev) of StrayBombay with their first title The Anacrusis.
- Dylan Fitterer trying out their classic music game, Audiosurf.
- Sekai Project CEO Christopher Ling mentions needing better controller support for visual novels (plus another).
- LionShield getting ready for Kingdom and Castles.
- Mike Rose from No More Robots does a little extreme sports on the Steam Deck with Descenders.
- Cliff Harris of Positech mentions Democracy 4 works well and also did a video on Production Line.
- Dave Oshry of publisher New Blood has shots of a couple different games.
- It may not be designed for VR but that hasn't stopped people trying too and how about a little Pistol Whip?
We could keep going for a while (there's a lot) but hopefully you found this small slice interesting.
It's getting very exciting to see such a huge push and seeing so many developers genuinely excited about it and impressed. Such a completely different world to the old Steam Machines. Hopefully this really will get developers to pay attention to Linux more, although some are likely to only support the Steam Deck specifically. Our reservation is in the Q1 2022 batch so we have to wait a while.
For those that also somehow missed it both Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye also recently announced support.
The question to you: what will be the first game you play on the Steam Deck when it arrives? It's a question that seems easy but I've been asking it myself and I'm completely lost.
Last edited by WorMzy on 27 September 2021 at 1:54 pm UTC
The first test on whether it can run it or not, where I am not expecting it to run it very well is probably going to be Star Citizen.
The first I'll try to complete is probably going to be Hollow Knight, though.
Last edited by Wrzlprnft on 27 September 2021 at 11:38 am UTC
This might still change during the time that is going to pass until I get the device in my hands in reality, but nonetheless I am really excited for it.
Last edited by lessster on 27 September 2021 at 11:46 am UTC
I would've ordered one if it was possible to use it as a controller in a proper way (remote play doesn't count).
I'm more interested in the SteamOS version that will run.
I'm saying that because I've seen at least two videos where the devs were just running plain Windows (though maybe externally) on the kit that they received.
Last edited by dubigrasu on 27 September 2021 at 12:32 pm UTC
Quoting: rustybroomhandleMore X-Plane. https://twitter.com/feresignum/status/1442263301283401729Already linked in the article ;)
Hopefully we'll see some anti-cheat landing long before then, though. Exciting times!
What a surprise, hm?
See more from me