Steam Deck Can Play The Platform's Entire Library "Without Problems," Valve Says

Valve said in a new interview discussing the Steam Deck that the handheld PC can run just every game in the platform's catalog without a hitch.

A quartet of Valve developers sat down with IGN talk about the Steam Deck's capabilities at length, from the custom APU designed in collaboration with AMD to the portability of Steam games via the SD card slot. During the conversation, hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said the team ensured that "every game we wanted to be playable" was playable on Steam Deck.

"The whole thing is powered with a custom APU that we basically worked with AMD on to deliver the best performance and best battery life possible in this envelop," Aldehayyat said. "I think it's very, very difficult to make direct comparisons to anything, but we think that we were to achieve a point where all the games we wanted to be playable [had] a really good experience."

Developer Pierre-Loup Griffais followed up on Aldehayyat's comment, saying that while previous prototypes had issues running last year's games, the upcoming Steam Deck can handle just about any title with no problems.

"This is the first time that we've achieved the level of performance that is required to really run the latest generation of games without problems," Griffais said. "All the games that we wanted to be playable is really the entire Steam library [and] we haven't really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn't handle--at least not yet."

This news contradicts earlier reports of the Steam Deck's incapability of running games like Apex Legends. Game Informer wrote up a list of incompatible titles, explaining that the issue is with how games are developed for consoles and the hardware's Linux-based underpinnings.

Furthermore, Ubisoft said in an earnings call earlier this week that the company would bring its games to Steam Deck if the demand is there. It's worth nothing that because the Steam Deck is basically a portable PC capable of running other storefronts, Ubisoft's catalog is already available. It's this flexibility in OS compatibility that makes the Steam Deck essentially a universal PC machine.

The Steam Deck launches this December, though order availability is not expected to open until Q2 2022. Of the three available models, we suggest either of the more expensive 256 GB or 512 GB ones as the cheaper Steam Deck uses 64 GB eMMC storage that's much slower than you might expect.