Gamers: this game is unplayable on the Steam Deck
Valve: OK, this game isn’t playable on the Steam Deck
PCGamesN: VALVE JUST MADE THEIR RATING ACCURATE I WILL NEVER TRUST VALVE AGAIN
What kind of logic is this?
Yea what the fuck. This is clickbait as absolute fucking shit. “Gaming journalism” my ass.
There’s a solid portion, the most vocal (hopefully) minority, of gamers who thrive on drama. They’ll read this article and hop on the hate waggon. Claim they always hated Valve. And then go brigade the “wokest” game they can find. This article wasn’t written for people who take a second to think.
Modern games are ever changing, the Verified Status is only valid for the version of the game that was tested. Valve has no influence over the patches and changes to the game.
Modern games are ever changing
No, that’s a Steam thing. What was the reason again, that you can’t stop an update for more than a few hours?
Well, it broke my mod setup in Surviving Mars with an update for their Underground DLC (which i didn’t want) and the modder of most of the best mods gave up. Which is why i’m mostly itch.io & GoG now, offline.
Well… Yes, Steam has a (very stupid in my eyes) policy of “if the developer puts up an update, then everyone must update” but that is not (fully) invalidating my point.
The content of the update and the time of release of the update is still outside of Steams responsibility. If the developer decides to push an update that uses some crazy stuff that works fine in Windows but would need some obscure codepath that are not available in Wine/Proton and by that rendering a game with a “Great on Deck” rating to “unplayable” then there is nothing Steam can do about it. Or if the developer patches in some DRM that will not run on Linux. Well, yes they could put up some lines in the terms of contracts for the developers to disallow this kind of changes but i am sure this would not end well at all.
Another thing, that most likely could even less be regulated, would be if the developer pushes an update that changes the UI to something that looks great on a huge screen but is unreadable on the SteamDeck.
Yes, all this would be way less an issue if Steam would make updates optional or would allow (an easy way) to choose the version. So i am totally on your side with that point.
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It would matter if I saw a single person trying to refund the game denied. Generally, when something like this happens on steam, valve gets very lax with the refund policy - just look at what happened with helldivers 2.
Well, it’s player based isn’t it?
The whole “Playability Theough Proton” rating system is based on player feedback, or at least that’s what I thought.
It is my understanding, and I acknowledge that I pull my sources out of my ass, that it is primarily outsourced to player feedback, but VALVe can and does sometimes force a specific rating for highly anticipated or already popular games. I can’t tell if that’s what happened here because the article seems more focused on smearing VALVe than reporting on what process lead to this happening.
because the article seems more focused on smearing VALVe than reporting
I think we have an answer right there.
The site is garbage blog spam, but I agree that Valve lacks consistency with some of their decision, related to the Deck or Steam at large.
The Steam Deck compatibility ratings (Verified, Playable, Unsupported) on Steam are directly from Valve. They test each game and give it a rating. Some employee probably had to play a lot of Hentai Puzzle games. Sometimes I get asked on the Deck, if the rating is correct, but I don’t know if any rating ever changed, because tons of users complained (I didn’t even hear of this Spider-Man thing).
ProtonDB ratings (Gold, Silver, Platinum), that you might get through a browser extension, are made through user feedback.
That the Valve ratings can’t always be trusted has been known since basically the Steam Deck launch. Some games are Verified, but can barely run, with the lowest settings. This way, Valve can pad some numbers and point to the AAA games that run on the Deck. The opposite doesn’t usually happen, maybe games like Ghost of Tsushima, which is mentioned in the article, is rated Unsupported, because of the multiplayer, that doesn’t work, but single player is fine.
I honestly thought VALVe ran protondb.com but I can see now at the bottom of the page it says This site has no affiliation with Valve Software.
