You can already play a pretty wide selection of PC games on the Steam Deck without issue, but now you can add a bunch of amazing Microsoft Studios PC games to the list.
Microsoft has just updated the status of a wide variety of its games to Steam Deck Verified, and several others to Playable. A game that's Verified on the new platform has been tested and confirmed to work extremely well on the hardware, as well as the Proton API that translates Windows 11 games to Steam Deck games.
Playable games, on the other hand, are known to work, but there might be some issues when you play them.
Big multiplayer heavy-hitters are still left out of the Steam Deck fun, however. Games like Gears 5, the Halo PC games and Microsoft Flight Simulator X are all listed as unsupported, likely due to the anti-cheat software that these titles use. But if you don't really like playing with other people anyway (we don't), there's still plenty of Microsoft games that are now verified.
Among the newly verified games are Deathloop, Psychonauts 2, and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. And games that are Playable but not quite Verified include Forza Horizon 5 and Fallout 4. The lovely folks over at The Verge went ahead and included a full list of the included games, so if you want to see whether your favorite game is included, we encourage you to check that out.
Analysis: the Steam Deck is gathering up support
One of the only major problems with buying a Steam Deck is that while it will support a wide variety of games on Steam, if you want to play games from other publishers and storefronts, you're going to have to wipe the thing and install Windows 11.
Luckily, Valve has recently released Windows drivers for the Steam Deck that allow you to do just that, but the more games that get natively supported for the SteamOS software - or at least the Proton translation API - the better.
Looking to try Windows on Deck? GPU, WiFi and Bluetooth Windows drivers for Steam Deck have just landed. More details and info here: https://t.co/JfuTkVCZ82 pic.twitter.com/kZIAC5RPd8March 10, 2022
Because at the end of the day wiping your Steam Deck and installing Windows 11 is just a hassle that you shouldn't have to put yourself through to play games that should theoretically be compatible. Literally the only thing stopping the Steam Deck from running games on the Epic Games Store or titles that you picked up from GOG is OS compatibility.
Proton is generally pretty excellent at making most PC games work on the Steam Deck, but it's nonetheless part of the Steam software, so you can't really make it work on other storefronts - at least not without a Herculean effort.
It's nevertheless handy that the Steam Deck is open enough that you can install a different operating system to play a wider selection of games at all. It would have been just as easy for Valve to lock down the Steam Deck instead, forcing its users to use SteamOS, and by proxy, its storefront.
- If you want to be sure your favorite PC game is supported, you could get a gaming laptop
