Your Steam Deck will now run some amazing Microsoft Studios games better
Microsoft has marked some of its best games as Steam Deck verified
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You can already play a pretty wide selection of PC games on theSteam Deckwithout issue, but now you can add a bunch of amazingMicrosoftStudiosPC gamesto the list.
Microsoft has just updated the status of a wide variety of its games toSteamDeck 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 translatesWindows 11games 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 likeGears 5, the Halo PC games andMicrosoft Flight Simulator Xare 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 areDeathloop, Psychonauts 2, and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. And games that are Playable but not quite Verified includeForza Horizon 5andFallout4. The lovely folks over at TheVergewent 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 installWindows 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.
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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’thaveto put yourself through to play games that should theoretically be compatible. Literally the only thing stopping the Steam Deck from running games on theEpic GamesStore 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 differentoperating systemto 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.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN. Previously, she was TechRadar’s US computing editor. She is fat, queer and extremely online. Computers are the devil, but she just happens to be a satanist. If you need to know anything about computing components, PC gaming or the best laptop on the market, don’t be afraid to drop her a line on Twitter or through email.
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