Valve has confirmed that a technical problem impacting a small number of titles has been rectified.
Steam users recently began to fear that developers could be able to prohibit their games from being played on the portable gaming PC, but Valve quickly stated this isn’t the case, and the misunderstanding has arisen over what’s really a “technical problem” and a mistake, which has since been resolved.
Demon Gaze Extra (a JRPG), which was discovered on Twitter, seemed to be unable to be installed on the Steam Deck (but if you downloaded on the desktop and transferred the game files across, it did work).
Initially, this created the spectre of game makers purposefully prohibiting their games from being put on the Steam Deck, but the Steam Deck manufacturer quickly ruled this out.
Before the Deck launch, we implemented a functionality to enable developers to classify particular content/depots as relevant solely for Deck users,” Valve said in an email to PC Gamer.
“This would let developers to automatically give a different default graphics configuration on Deck, for example. Unfortunately, certain information was wrongly classified as the opposite (“send these depots to every client not on a Deck”) due to a technical error.”
It was observed that the relevant functionality had been modified so that developers could no longer unintentionally mark their games as blocked, and Valve claims it is “working with partners to resolve the problem” for any titles that are already in the conundrum where they can’t be installed because of this error.
Not much to be upset about.
Fortunately, this turned out to be nothing more than a blip on the radar, and we should expect any impacted games to be fixed soon.
We’ve seen a recent beta version from Valve that seems to address the fan whining issues that some Steam Deck owners have complained about, which is a good sign for the platform.
However, note that the fan repair is still in beta, so any negative side-effects should be sorted out with additional testing. Although PC Gamer did some testing and found that even with more taxing games like Elden Ring, temperatures did not rise to an unmanageable level.
With the recent announcement by Valve that it now has over 2,000 games in the verified or playable category – i.e., those evaluated as functioning well with Steam Deck – many of the most popular PC games are now included, compatibility is progressing quickly.