How many of you install games outside Steam on your Decks? Do you find the process easy?
I’m a hobbyist game developer myself, and I’m looking into making games especially designed for the Steam Deck. However, for freeware games, the $100 price per title on the Steam store is a bit too steep. I wish there was an easy-to-use alternative store on the Deck, but since that’s not the case, I’m wondering if it would make any sense to develop games for the Deck and publish them, for example, on Itch.io.
(As a proof of concept, I created this step-by-step guide for a hacky Steam Deck version of my old game, Soccer Physics. I think it still applies, even though it’s a year-old build/guide: https://www.ottoojala.com/soccerphysicssteamdeck/ )
I’ll play whatever game is good, from whatever platform has the best price, provided it’s compatible.
I only play games on Steam, GoG, or free games from Epic.
GoG and Epic are very easy to install with Heroic Games Launcher.
I play Dofus, both in desktop and gaming mode. The fact that a tactical turn-by-turn RPG optimized only for keyboard an mouse is playable on gaming mode feels so empowering, it certainly took some time to configure bindings though 😅
So far I haven’t installed a single non-Steam game. I don’t have the energy for tinkering with things anymore, and I like the Deck because it’s easy and doesn’t require any fiddling to get things to work
I’ve installed many non steam games on my deck, but the vast majority were ones I already had on my PC. I’ve found the easiest way by far is just to copy over the installed game folder to the steamdeck via ftp and add to steam. Only one game I’ve had to do any fiddling with so far, and that was just installing vcc studio dependencies with wine tricks. Other than that everything has worked with zero fiddling.
I do, but mostly because I had them already on a different platform, and even then I’ll procrastinate a lot before doing it. Even when the process isn’t too complicated, you lose things like community controller layouts, which is frustrating.
