Valve goes into detail on which recent games have huge Steam Deck audiences

As part of the festivities surrounding the announcement of the limited-edition white Steam Deck OLED, a number of Steam Deck developers from Valve have agreed to an interview discussing the device’s success. According to their comments, some recent releases have become particularly popular on the Deck.

In the interview hosted on Automaton Media, Valve’s designer Lawrence Yang and programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais discussed the state of the Deck and some of its biggest successes. Of course, the crux of the matter was the fancy new Steam Deck model. On that topic, Yang said “If we see similar interest, we would definitely be interested in looking into other color variations in the future,” which is good news for collectors. More interesting for the rest of us is the fact that “there are many games that have an outsized Steam Deck audience,” as Yang puts it.

Certain games enjoy an ‘outsized Steam Deck audience’, which is great news for Valve

According to Yang, “Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, UFO 50, The Plucky Squire, Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMix, and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, are just a few examples of the games where Steam Deck players represent 10-20% of all playtime on Steam in the past month.” These games all lend themselves particularly well to the Deck’s pick-up-and-play mantra: sidescrollers, survival titles, roguelikes, and RPGs all perform great on Valve’s gaming handheld, after all. Yet, to hear that Steam Deck players make up to 20% of the total playtime of some of these games on Steam is impressive regardless.

Valve hasn’t given out any hard data on how many Steam Decks have been sold so far. We do know, however, that sales have been going strong from day one. Some have even double-dipped after the OLED model was announced, which massively boosts Valve’s bottom line.

Further, Yang has also stated that even though they didn’t have complete stats ready to reference for the Automaton interview, “over 95% of the [newly submitted] titles tested were Playable or Verified” on Steam in the recent weeks. This shows that not only has the Deck entrenched itself as an important new way of experiencing PC gaming, but that the developers have outright embraced it as well.

It’s not all hunky-dory, of course. Arguably the biggest problem with the Steam Deck as of today is also its biggest boon: Linux. While Linux is rather performant, customizable, and flexible in the grand scheme of things, developers have recently begun removing support for it due to excessive cheating.

Valve keeps track of these happenings, of course, and Pierre-Loup Griffais has chimed in on that specifically: “We have been monitoring the trend of games requiring kernel-level access for their anti-cheat technologies and not supporting Steam Deck as a result,” he said. “We are extremely aware of the critical need for countermeasures against cheating in online games, but are also considering options carefully. Some of the approaches popular now in the industry might present problematic trade-offs for the end-user in the longer term.”

No easy solution, in other words. As Yang explained in a prior comment, Valve has done the work to establish a cheat integration baseline with EAC, for example, but that’s still a far cry from being the one-size-fits-all solution the Steam Deck needs. In the interim, we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out and, perhaps, keep our competitive gaming needs relegated to old-school desktop PCs.