Steam Deck News!

Hey everybody, it's your friend and your guy and your favorite delusional Linux guy, Gardiner! It's that time of the week again: Steam Deck news time. If you're a Steam Deck fan, make sure you get subscribed to stay up to date on all the Deck news and information! And with that, let's get into the news.

Humble has a new Bundle. And I should disclose that I'm a Humble partner. So if you use my link in the description, I'll make a small commission off your purchase.

But anyway, the name of this bundle is the "Handheld PC Power Bundle" and it's 8 games that are rated either Steam Deck... er... I guess "Handheld" Verified or Playable.

It's kinda funny to me how hard Humble is going out of their way to not say "Steam Deck." And if you look at the information page, it actually says "Play on Windows" while being a bunch of Deck-ready games.

But anyway, if you pay at least $20, you get 8 games. Orcs Must Die! 3, Neon Abyss: Deluxe Edition, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, Mutan Year Zero: Road to Eden - Deluxe Edition, Parkasaurus, Paint the Town Red, Exanima, and Orcs Must Die! 2 - Complete.

But, as is tradition for Bundles like this, buying it will also support charity: Lifelites and Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

There are definitely a few titles here I'm excited to play on my Deck. But I'd like to know: are you going to pick up this bundle? What games are you excited for?

Next up, let's talk about how Pierre-Loup has confirmed that other 16:10 resolutions will be made available for games to select. What does that mean? Well, this came to my attention when a twitter user named Michelle asked Valve's Pierre-Loup:

I was wondering if Valve could make this script [link] as a built-in feature? Currently many games don't recognize under 800p 16:10 resolutions and this goes a long way into fixing that.

To which he replied:

Yeah, that's on the list.

So I dug a little deeper. The script that Michelle is this one. Don't be alarmed. It's just a shell script! This will add the multiple 16:10 resolutions to your Deck so that games can select them. This will let you render games at less than (or even greater than) the native 1200x800 resolution of your Deck's screen.

This is cool to see as these resolutions will allow you to optimize your gaming experience at the native 16:10 aspect ratio, rather than having to letterbox your games.

And Pierre-Loup confirmed that this will eventually make it to the Deck.

Following up Pierre-Loup's confirmation, another user Knurek asked if we'll be seeing a playtime dashboard in the vein of the Nintendo 3DS. This is a feature I've asked for since day 1 of having my Steam Deck and I'd just like to reiterate my support for this feature!

C'mon, Valve. You're already collecting this data, just make a dashboard to display it!

A new Release of EmulationStation Desktop Edition has landed! In this release there are a ton of changes and feature improvements including: "make[ing] it possible to display multi-disc games as single entries."

This is a feature the community has been asking for for a while so it's great to see here! They also added support for a number of additional emulators!

On May 9th, Western Digital announced that they were releasing a new 2TB SSD that will be physically compatible with the cramped internals of the Steam Deck. This new SSD from Western Digital--called the SN740--is in an M.2 2230 form factor. The same form factor as the drives that ship with the Deck--but in a much larger capacity.

Honestly, I know there are lots of people who will be very excited to get their hands on this... but I'm more than happy with my 512 Gig Steam Deck and a 1TB SSD. I have over 600 games in my Steam Library, but I haven't run out of room yet!

Speaking of games.. there are now over 2500 Deck Verified or Playable games! This is a nice round number we can celebrate as it's a good portion of Steam Games. Several notable titles have become Verified including Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga and Days Gone.

It you made it this far into the video, there's a 90% chance you're enjoying this video. You can't argue with that. It's science. So why not like that smash button? And if you're feeling really generous, you can SMASH that SUBSCRIBE button. We're trying to get to 100k subscribers by this summer. And with your help I think we can do it!

Okay. So now it's time for the biggest news of the week... and as is usual... it's a Deck update. Steam Deck Client Update

The Steam Deck received a new Client update on Wednesday night and it brought a few surprising features with it. Some of the highlights are:

  • When connected to an external display, Steam Deck interface is now scaled to virtual 1280x800 resolution
  • Many keyboard fixes and updates including enabling Non-ASCII characters in Desktop Mode.
  • Moved the Re-order Controllers button to the "Other" section in the Quick Access menu.
  • Added a "Stop Streaming" option to the Power menu when hosting a Remote Play session.
  • Fixes for Offline mode.
  • Fixed the annoying issue of multiple new Steam Inventory items notifications appearing.

But I think the two largest feature additions/improvements are Per-game performance profiles and the new support for the Steam Hardware Survey.

Per-game performance profiles are HUGE and there was no indication from Valve that this feature was coming until they just dropped it on us.

  • Players can now set game-specific performance settings. This feature is accessed in Quick Access Menu > Performance > Advanced View
  • By default games will use the system performance settings
  • If per game settings are toggled on, a profile for the currently running title is created. Any edits will be saved and automatically applied when the game is launched
  • You can always toggle this off to go back to system default settings, or reset to system default settings at any time

So awesome. That means we won't have to remember which games perform best with which settings. We can just enable the per-title performance settings and the Deck will do the tedious work for us.

And while this DOES save us time, the feature I'm even more excited about is the addition of the Steam Hardware Survey to the Deck.

Guys. Seriously. This is huge. This hopefully means that for the month of May, we should get hardware survey data. Real. Tangible. Data.

We should hopefully see information about what percentage of Steam gamers are playing on the Deck and boost the overall number of Linux gamers. This might even give us a clue about how many Decks have been shipped!b