I'm a new Deck owner, recieved unit in May and played sparingly for the past 2ish months.

Overall really liking it, gushed about it everywhere to everyone, and big fan of Valve. But two days ago, one of the Deck shoulder buttons stopped working suddenly. Reached out to steam and they're having me send it in, which is what I would expect. But the way they phrased it kind of souring my initial high of owning the Deck:

Based on the information you have provided, we believe it is unlikely that the current issue reflects a problem with this device as it was delivered to you. It may instead be related to your particular use of the product. Regardless, we would like to offer complimentary service as a gesture of goodwill.

So it's one of those kinds of warranty that excludes regular use? Is this one rep just awkwardly placing blame on me or is that their overall vibe? In contast, I have PS1, PS2, xBox original/360 controllers that still have all the shoulder buttons functioning normally, along with super old PSPs, DS, DS Lites, 3DS, Switch'es and none of them have failed aside from the infamous Switch drifts. Nintendo, for their part, fixed the drifts without implying it was my fault.

Anyone else dealt with Valve customer service and warranty?

August 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

I recently had a hankering to return to one of my all-time favorite games: FUEL. I couldn't stop thinking: how cool would it be if I could revisit the game from the comfort of my Steam Deck?

That was my dream, but a few problems stood in the way:

1. FUEL was released in 2009 and was delisted from Steam in 2013. (Thankfully, I have a copy of it in my library, but we're talking about an installation build that is over a decade out-of-date at this point.)

2. FUEL still has Securom DRM.

3. FUEL still requires Games for Windows Live, which was also shut down in 2013.

4. FUEL is pretty mediocre unless you install the REFUELED mod.

So, I sat down with my Steam Deck and a hope and a prayer that maybe, somehow, I could get this game working?

Hurdle 1 wasn't even a hurdle. Proton is so damn good now. The game installed and ran flawlessly. I honestly never should have second-guessed it in the first place!

Hurdle 2 was also, surprisingly, a non-issue. Either the Securom servers are somehow still live and actually checked my CD key, or the dialog box lied to me as part of an offline fallback and told me I was cleared anyway (I'm thinking this is more likely?). Either way, I was happy.

Hurdle 3 was the first actual block. The game crashes when trying to pull up GFWL, which is pretty much what I expected -- the service has been down for over a decade now. Thankfully, there's an unexpectedly easy fix. Xliveless is a DLL that bypasses GFWL and lets the game boot (and save) without it.

Hurdle 4 isn't really a hurdle per se, but that's only because the Steam Deck lets you boot into Desktop Mode and get fully under the hood. I downloaded the mod, dumped the files in the installation folder, ran the mod manager through Protontricks, and then set up all of my mod choices. I then jumped back into game mode, and the game is flawlessly running -- mods and all.

I should also mention that I did all of this on-device. I didn't need to break out a mouse and a keyboard or transfer files from my desktop or anything. From the first install of the game to running it fully modded took me maybe ten minutes total? It was amazingly quick, and most of that time was me searching up information or waiting for the Deck to boot over and back between Desktop and Game Mode.

I realize that, in the grand scheme of game tinkering, this doesn't sound like a whole lot, but that's honestly the point. The fact that this comes across as sort of mundane and uneventful is, paradoxically, what makes it noteworthy. If we're keeping score here, I am:

• playing a 2009 Windows game,
• that was delisted in 2013,
• on a Linux handheld device in 2024.

I also:

• somehow passed the game's decade-old DRM check,
• bypassed the game's second DRM system that has been officially shut down for over a decade,
• modded the game in literal seconds,
• and did all that using only a controller -- while lying on my couch.

From a zoomed out perspective, I shouldn't be able to play this game. FUEL should be dead and buried -- nothing more than a fond memory for me. Even if I turn the dial a little more towards optimism, it really shouldn't be this easy to get up and running. I thought I was going to spend hours trying to get it going, with no guarantee that it ever would. Instead I was driving around its world in mere minutes.

I'm literally holding FUEL and its massive open-world in my hands, fifteen years after its release, on an operating system it's not supposed to run on, and on a device nobody could have even imagined was possible when the game released.

We really are living in the future. I remain in absolute awe of and incredibly grateful for all the work that people do to make stuff like this possible.

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam Sale topic.

An update for this topic: I've always used the number of Steam reviews for a game as a rough proxy for the game's audience size. It's not perfect, but it works well enough. Steam effectively made this canon in one of their recent sales. They had a Hidden Gems category and then broke the game list out into different tiers based the number of reviews each one had. I saved their taxonomy so I could use it here.

Feel free to tag or group your recommendations based on these if you like:

All the categories above, except for the last one, are how Steam defined their different tiers. I have some qualms with them using "Cult Classic" there, but I'm going to follow suit for consistency's sake.

I myself added the last category, because I think there are plenty of games worth mentioning with more than 1000 reviews that still have a solid Hidden Gem vibe but have since found bigger audiences and "graduated" from the label.

July 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

I've gamed my entire life on Windows until about a month ago, when I switched due to my dissatisfaction with it as an operating system (another thread, another time). After years of hearing that gaming on Linux was improving thanks to Steam Deck and Proton, I took the plunge and installed Pop!_OS on my desktop and loaded my favorite games. Holy smokes, it's amazing. I haven't found a game yet that's required any custom tweaking; download the game through Steam, let it install whatever it needs to on first run, and away they go. I'm blown away.

However, I want to start exploring Linux-native titles in a more deliberate manner. Do many others here game on Linux, and if so what are some of your favorites that you would recommend now that the Steam Summer Sale is on? I mostly gravitate towards builders and colony simulators, RPGs, and 4X games, but I'll take any recommendations that people are excited to share.

[Edit to add:] Thanks for your recommendations everyone! I'll definitely check out several of these.

According to SteamDB, at the time of this posting:

• There are 5,006 Verified games.
• There are 10,240 Playable games.

I thought this was a noteworthy milestone worth sharing -- The Little Linux Handheld That Could now has a definitive library of >15,000 games!

(The actual library size is significantly larger when you consider how many games run on it that don't yet have a rating, and even that's saying nothing of non-Steam games and things like ROMs as well).

Edit: This community is amazing, thank you all for all of your suggestions. Feel free to keep them coming. I have a Google doc full of ideas with my comments that I'm going to drop on him. I was trying to respond to everyone and then discovered that Tildes will rate limit you. So if I don't respond to you, I'm sorry but I definitely read your comment and checked out your suggestions!

My friend suffers from depression and lives 6 hours away from me so the happiest I see him is when we are regularly gaming together. The problem is that I haven't been able to find a game we both wanted to play for a while.

I just cannot get into all the survival crafting games that seem to dominate co-op gaming these days. I am looking for suggestions for anything else. Also, it needs to be an online co-op instead of a couch co-op.

His computer isn't the best so that needs to be a consideration, nothing wrong with older games. Ideally we are talking about PC games on Steam.

Examples:

• we played a ton of Risk of Rain 2, probably the last game we played a lot together
• we have played through Halo co-op a bunch of times.

Who has ideas for me?

June 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

User reports: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/4362376335340911703/?ctp=2

Likely because Steam has not complied with local laws (in fact, they have no local presence at all on Vietnam).

I do wonder if Steam is going to do anything. Complying with Vietnam's regulation is probably too burdensome to be worth the revenue, but on the other hand, Steam's promise with their DRM has always been that they would "unlock" the games if they had to shut down, and now they're shut down in a specific country.

Vietnamese Steam users have been sold products which they cannot play at all anymore, at least while following the laws of their Communist (so, totalitarian) regime. It's not a great situation for them.

Well, to be honest, they're probably going to do nothing. But I do wonder to what extent Valve, who knew they were not in compliance, should have not sold games at all in Vietnam? Similar to the Helldivers situation, surely they knew this shoe was dropping.

May 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

So I have heard of the game for a while, but I am not a fan of zombie games. I was recently shown a video apparently about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XuKU2RziLo), and the game itself looks pretty awesome from my point of preferences.
The problem? None really, except... zombies. Just not a fan at all.

Edit: I like the menu options, though they seem like they could be clunky. I like the survival and crafting aspects.

So my question is this: Are there any games similar to this style of gameplay that might do without the zombies?

Would prefer on Steam/Linux, but if you have a similar equivalent that's great. Thanks. :)

April 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Steam Sale time again! Post any amazing games or hidden gems you think others would like. I'll start: Mr Shifty is an amazing 2d top-down that's crazy fun (especially for its price!). I'm about to get a SteamDeck, so am hunting these style of games in particular.

March 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

February 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

For those out of the loop, Steam Next Fest is a week long event (Feb. 5 - Feb. 12) celebrating upcoming games through demos and developer livestreams.

Which demos have you been playing, and which releases are you looking forward to?

I've been running Linux full-time pretty much since Valve released Proton. I remember submitting reports to ProtonDB back when it was just a shared Google Sheet! In the years that followed I made it a point to test and report out on different games as new versions of Proton were released and support improved. I thought it important that we have a good data set for what worked and what didn't. Over those years I tested hundreds of games and submitted as many reports to the database.

In thinking back over my gaming in 2023, however, I realized that I fell out of the habit of submitting reports because I'm so used to Proton working that it's stopped occurring to me that it might not.

That doesn't mean that there aren't some games that don't work -- it simply means that the success rate that I used to have (maybe 30-50% on average) has risen high enough that I'm genuinely surprised if something doesn't work (it's probably somewhere around 95% for me now, though that's biased by the types of games that I play). I actually tried to remember the last game that didn't work, and I genuinely couldn't tell you what it was. Everything I've played recently has booted like it's native.

Honestly, I genuinely don't even know which games are native and which run through Proton anymore. I've stopped caring!

I got my Steam Deck halfway through 2022. It was awesome, but it was definitely a bit rough around the edges. There weren't that many compatible games. The OS had some clunkiness. It matured though, and has gotten better. Among my friend group, I'm the only person who cares even a little bit about Linux. If you asked any of them to name three different Linux distributions they'd stare at you blankly because they wouldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, of my friends, SIX of them have Steam Decks and are now gaming regularly on Linux.

There are currently ~4,300 Deck Verified games and ~8,700 Deck Playable games according to Valve. On ProtonDB, ~8,600 games have been verified as working on Linux by at least three users, while ~19,700 games have been verified by at least one user. There is SO much variety available, and the speed with which we've gotten here has been pretty breathtaking.

This was my device breakdown for my Steam Replay for 2023:

• 55% Steam Deck
• 32% Linux
• 10% Virtual Reality
• 4% Windows

The only non-Linux gaming I did was VR and some local multiplayer stuff I have on a Windows machine hooked up to my TV.

I don't want to proselytize too much, but if you have a general interest in gaming, you could probably switch over to Linux full time and be perfectly happy with the variety of games you have available to you. Not too long ago, making the jump felt like a huge sacrifice because you'd be giving up so much -- SO many games were incompatible -- but it no longer feels that way. You can transfer and most of -- probably almost all -- your library will still work! Also, if a particular game doesn't work, there isn't too much sting because, well, there are thousands of others you can give your attention to.

If you have a specific game that you must play, then it's possibly a different story. If you love Destiny 2, for example, then full-time Linux definitely is not for you. The same goes VR -- it's simply not up to snuff on Linux yet. There are other niches too that don't transfer over as well (modding, racing sims, etc.) so, of course, this isn't a blanket recommendation and everyone's situation is different.

But for a prototypical person who's just your sort of general, everyday gamer? It's reached a point where they could be very happy on Linux. In fact, as proven by my friends and their Steam Decks, it's reached a point where people can be gaming on Linux and not even know they're doing that. That's how frictionless it's gotten!

I don't really have a point to this post other than to say it's incredible that we are where we are, and I'm beyond appreciative of all the effort that people have put in to making this possible.

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

There’s no hard requirement for what counts as a “hidden gem.” Any game that you think deserves more attention counts.

For general and popular game recommendations for the sale, please use this topic instead.

(I already wrote this once, but my phone didn't like it and randomly deleted the whole thing... ◕∩◕ )

I've been wanting to develop some games for a while now, and I have an overarching theme idea in mind. I couldn't decide on top down pixelated game or 3D style, because it's more of a visual story kind of game, where you explore, build a base (or several), meet and talk to NPCs, learn the story, etc. I want a lot of detail but I only have (minimal) experience with pixelated games. So naturally, 3D sounds better for a higher detailed, and maybe stylized environment.

I don't know much at all about code ( for example, I had to look up how to format this post). I don't even know what languages there are other than Java. I make resourcepacks for Minecraft, but that's minimal coding for the .mcmeta file. I do also make fabric mods for it, but I use MCreator for those, which I'm sure is like training wheels for coding.

I have the skills for graphics for both characters/environments and GUI/HUD elements. I have an idea for my story, and a few ideas for characters. What I know I don't have is experience in balancing things like economies, rpg skills, fighting, and weapons/armor and their upgrades. But I'm not really planning on implementing those, at least not right now. (The economy would be first if I did)

I recently saw a video on youtube showcasing Unity Engine's nanite environments, and basically, I want in on that. They're gorgeous.

The Questions

So my 8 questions are, on a scale of one to ten (ten being basically impossible for one single person to do), how difficult would it be to make these elements in a singleplayer, 3D game for someone without experience (like me):

1. Sky, ground, objects (like trees, flowers, rocks, etc) and other environment visuals' 3D models for exploration? I need to be able to walk on it, and maybe hit things like trees for lumber.

2. Base building and gathering the materials to build? This comes with the inventory issue as well (looking at you, Minecraft), which I'm still trying to figure out how I want to do this.

3. Crafting said gathered materials for building elements and items to gift to NPCs? This will need GUI and workbench, most likely.

4. Collectibles? Think koroks from BoTW or the museum artifacts in Stardew Valley. I'd like for the player to be able to display these only in/on a shelf/table/glass case inside their base(s).

5. NPCs with many hours worth of randomized dialogue interaction, gifts to and from NPCs, as well as a few friendship levels and unlockable interactions/gifts?

6. What would the time frame look like for me to learn Unity's Engine for these elements, or is there a better engine I should be aware of?

7. What materials might you guess that I'd need to spend money on to make this game? I already have: a Mac, the Adobe Suite, a drawing tablet, all the time in the world, and ideas. Would I need a license for anything?

8. What have I overlooked? 3D modeling (and not just blocky models in blockbench) is a skill I realized I'd need to learn just as I was writing this post.

The reason I'm asking so many questions is because I can't tell if trying this will be worth my time or not, and if I could afford to hire someone for parts of it, if need be. I have ADHD, so I'm wondering if this is just the "new shiny thing" that has caught my eye (probably is). I don't want to dive into a major learning session and project development if it ultimately won't go anywhere because it's too hard for my smooth brain.

Then again, I see some games (what I would consider low quality) that I'm like, "man, I could've done that, that looks so simple and easy!" So basically I have no idea whether I'm near the peak of Mt Stupid on the Dunning-Kreuger graph, or if I'm past it and somewhere in the valley.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Also, feel free to talk to me like I'm a dumb 5 year old.