Hi everyone, I’m working on a new Decky plugin for Steam Deck that displays your heart rate from Apple Watch while you’re playing.

The plugin includes 8 on-screen positions, so you can place the heart rate widget wherever it fits best. I’m currently testing it on my own Twitch stream, but I also think it could be useful for casual players who want to keep an eye on their heart rate, especially in horror or intense games.

I’d love to hear your thoughts:

• Does this seem useful to you?
• Would you want something like this on your Steam Deck?
• What would you change about the design or behavior?
• Are there any features you’d like to see added?

Thank you so much for the feedback.

Maximum game resolution is back with better than before.

I traded my PS5 slim no disk for a 512GB Steam Deck OLED yesterday through Facebook Marketplace. I haven’t really been using my PS5 since I mainly play on PC. I saw his listing, and he was specifically looking to trade for a PS5. Considering I bought my PS5 from a pawn shop last year for only $275usd, I feel like it was a pretty good deal. I can always buy another PS5 later, and Steam Deck OLEDs tend to hold their value and are often overpriced on the used market, so I think it should be easy to trade for or buy another PS5 in the future.

the samsung evo plus was what i bought initially for my deck. the sandisk extreme is what came with the second hand nintendo switch i bought last year. not sure what to pick since both seem to have the same info/specs written on them.

I realized something the other day. I've been playing games for a long time, on a lot of different systems. I'm now on the wrong side of 40 years old, so do the math. What I realized is that my Steam Deck has on it right now some of the most important games from my life history. And this is not even counting emulation, which would basically allow it to play everything (but I'd have to download and setup emulators and there is the slight problem of not technically owning those games anymore).

So, maybe I'd share a few of the games that I played throughout my life, and why they matter to me. Maybe this will be boring, maybe it will inspire you.

The first game I ever bought with my own money was Megaman 5. I bought it from a toy store near to where I lived in about 1994. The first time I saw any of the Megaman games was Megaman 3. I saw my brother's friend play it, and I loved it instantly. Defeat and enemy and get their weapon? Holy cow this was so cool! It was so novel at the time. But Megaman 5, like all Megaman games, was hard, and I also lacked the confidence to play it myself. Eventually I think I defeated 5 of the 8 robot masters on my own, at like 10 years old. I was proud of myself. Back in those days, you couldn't easily read up what boss order to follow.

In case you're wondering, I do own the Castlevania games on Steam, but I never played Castlevania as a kid, so I won't mention it here. A lot of the other NES games I played were never successful enough to be ported to Steam, like Excite Bike. I did however play a lot of Sonic 2 and 3, and I'm happy to say that I own the older versions of those complete with the original soundtrack, on Steam.

We also had a PC around that time - it was a 486 DX2-66Mhz with 16mb of RAM, a CDROM and a sound card. Now, while I did play a lot of Doom and especially Doom 2, I don't own these on Steam, so I'll skip over them to Duke Nukem 3D, which I do own on Steam. I played DN3D to absolute death, and spent ages making maps for it. Unfortunately I lost a lot of them over the years, but that game was a huge time sink for me.

Around the time I went to high school, we upgraded to a P200MMX with 32mb of RAM, which let me play Diablo 2. Man that game was addictive! Fortunately, it's still as addictive as ever, and I have it on Steam Deck now. With much better graphics. I did play Baldurs Gate 2 as a teenager (probably on my later PC with an Athlon 700 CPU and 128mb of RAM), but only once. I later finished it multiple times as a young adult.

I played a lot of multiplayer games with friends at school. CounterStrike and StarCraft were popular choices. Now, the Steam Deck has CounterStrike Source (and GO which I never played). The remastered StarCraft probably works but I know from experience with Diablo 2 that non Steam games like it are difficult to setup. Ironically, we played a lot of Blood 2 multiplayer, and guess what came on sale the other day on Steam? Yup, Blood 2 in all its buggy glory for less than a dollar!

At university I ended up with an Athlon XP 2400+ with a Radeon 9200 non Pro. I played a lot of Half Life 2 and Doom 3, which you guessed it, are on Steam Deck.

As a fresh graduate, I bought my first gaming PC, a beast with a RAID 0 array (lol) and an 8800 GTS 640mb. I played lot Supreme Commander, which I hear is possible but difficult to get working on Steam Deck. I also bought a Nintendo DS, and while Pokemon games are impossible to run without third party emulation, Castlevania: OOE and Megaman ZX Advent work just fine with their respective Steam listings.

I ended up with an XBox 360, which sadly doesn't have many games on Steam. At least, I will forever miss Forza Motorsport 3 and 4. I did have Blazblue on 360, which I have for Steam (plus its sequels), and also had Street Fighter 4 on 360 (also its various sequels. I do have Ultra Street Fighter 4, but, controversial opinion I enjoyed the first edition of Street Fighter 4 more than any of the others. Best music, best experience.

The closer we get to recent times, the greater the percentage of the games are available natively on Steam, so this would get boring. I guess my point is that thanks to Proton creating a relatively stable target for games to work, and thanks to first party emulation, a huge amount of games from a variety of different console and PC generations just work. It's pretty awesome and I only stopped to think about it recently.

Hey r/SteamDeck!

We’re getting ready to launch Lootbound on July 31st, and we wanted to share that it’s fully optimized for Steam Deck play out of the box!

What is Lootbound? It’s a tactical roguelite where you start solo, recruit companions, and manage a grid-based inventory where item placement and "auras" drastically change your party’s build and stats.

Steam Deck Highlights:

• Designed with controller navigation & UI scaling in mind.
• Plays smooth with great battery efficiency.
• Free Demo available on Steam to try right now.

If you enjoy games like Slay the Spire or Darkest Dungeon, please check out the demo and Wishlist Lootbound on Steam—it makes a huge difference for our team!

Let us know what you think if you give the demo a spin!

>>> LOOTBOUND ON STEAM

Hey all!

I've had my Steam Deck OLED for about 3 years now, and I started fiddling with it and customizing it as soon as I got it. I was hooked! I could modify almost any aspect of my experience to my liking and try to squeeze as much performance as I could from the device. I had Decky with a a lot of plugins (visual, performance and general system optimizations), Cryoutils and some BIOS optimizations and probably a bunch of stuff that I tried but forgot about. I think that gave me the feeling that this was the everything machine and that I should at least check if I would be able to play games that came to my attention on it. Almost to the point where I spent more time doing that then actually playing the games.

Then recently, I started experiencing more and more small issues that started bother me. Game crashes, freeze and sudden reboots, no sound when waking from sleep until I restarted. It wasn't happening often but it's the small things that got me the impression that my Deck wasn't running very stable. At one point I decided I had enough of it and wanted to fix these issue, and I felt like I had two choice ahead of me:

1) Meticulously find and fix what was causing my issues, which is essentially what I was already doing to customize my device and led to me feeling like that was all I was doing.

2) Just factory reset (with BIOS) the damn thing and see how it felt.

I chose option #2, and was half expecting that I would redo my customizations slowly and try to avoid the issues that I had, but that didn't happen, with one exception. I just installed my games, installed proton-ge because in hindsight that's probably THE thing that actually made a difference for me in the past, and everything was fine! Most of my games had little to no performance drop and my device was feeling reliable again. I think I just had the highest amount of actual playtime in week in a good while now. It just feels so nice and make me realize that the Steam Deck is fine as is and that if I ever see myself wondering if a game could run better if I thinker with my machine, the time thinkering will probably not be as worth it as just playing the game. If the game isn't playable to my standards, I won't be able to make it playable anyway. This is kinda free to see it this way. I can just focus on what this device does best and then move on with my life.

I don't know where I'm going with this post lol. I just wanted to share my thoughts of my newly appreciation of the Steam Deck, and I'm sure I just sounded like the graph meme where people starting and not knowing but just having a good time are the same as people like me that choose to let all that thinkering go and just enjoy what it does out of the box. I'm sure it already exists in this subreddit. Anyway, I'm sure that whole process hapenned to some of you here. I'd be interested to know your experiences! Cheers

Edit: I'm seeing some people interpreting this post as hate towards customization and I just want to clarify that it's really not! I'm a programmer by trade. It's my job to fiddle and try things out on a computer, but here I realized that doing it with my Steam Deck was taking a bit too much time from the thing that I enjoy the most with it. Playing the games. As a tech savvy person, I'm really glad we have strong communities for customizing the experience on the Deck! That's how we see innovation and that's important.

I hate that after a month of usage my cable started acting up due to constant bending while playing, I had to purchase 180 cable adapter and stitch a velcro to to carry the weight of the cable. I hope machines that place their charging port on top would consider providing a 180 cable instead.

My kid loves Minecraft Bedrock on his Switch2 but it has a 2gb limit for add-ons,etc. I tried to get him playing Java via Prism but he prefers Bedrock at his age. Yesterday I bought an Asus ROG Xbox Ally X as a possible replacement for one of our aging Steam Decks knowing he could play Bedrock. Today my freaking elbows hurt, apparently I hold the Asus in a weird way? Anyway I went back down the rabbit hole of Bedrock on Linux and found this very recent article linking to the ‘BedrockOnLinux’ project on Github. It uses the Windows GDK version of Bedrock (not Android). I had it setup in no time at all and it works like a charm. I installed a performance mod and in my limited testing it’s doing a good 60fps.

In addition to the elbow thing I just found the whole experience to be extremely clunky. The Asus is most likely going back.

BedrockOnLinux: https://github.com/Wyze3306/BedrockOnLinux

The performance mod I mentioned: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft-bedrock/addons/bedrock-performance-optimizer

edit: I did have an error thrown when launching it from Gaming Mode. A few launch option flags from this comment fixed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1uz7lt8/comment/oy8icxc

Hi there!

My name is Jeff Ashbrook, and I’m the founder of indie development studio Adventure Works!

I used to work for Disney Imagineering’s R&D department, working on attractions like Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run. I have fond memories of watching classic animated adventure movies as a kid, and I’ve always dreamed of creating video games that pay homage to the films I grew up watching. 

Our debut title, a cinematic 2.5D puzzle platformer called LIFTED, launches today! Since we’re a new studio, we’re still working to get our  Steam Deck Verified badge, but we’ve optimized LIFTED specifically for Steam Deck so anyone can experience LIFTED’s movie-inspired buddy comedy adventure on the go.

Our Steam page is linked here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2184020/LIFTED/

I’m here to answer all kinds of questions you have on LIFTED’s development, including:

• LIFTED’s inspirations (including how a chance encounter with an archaeologist in Egypt led to the game’s creation)
• Development
• LIFTED’s family-friendly, retro gameplay design
• My time working as a Disney Imagineer
• How to make a game that feels like a classic buddy comedy

…and anything else you can think of! Ask me anything.

I’m specifically talking about cases that go on your SteamDeck while ur playing, not a storage case. I initially went no case for a while but picked up the Killswitch and a screen protector I noticed I used it much more. Anyone have any thoughts on why they do or don’t use a protective case on their SteamDeck?

I'm mostly asking here if a docked Steam Deck that's paired with a new Steam Controller will do things like come out of sleep, etc, in the same way a steam machine does. Does anyone here use a docked Steam Deck as a TV console with the Steam Controller in this way, and is it good?

For anyone who's in any doubt - I do realise that the Steam Machine is a more powerful device.

Something cut the elastic on my case making it fairly unusable, only had it 3 years so it was bit frustrating,

I ordered elastic off Amazon, perfect width, 10 yds was the smallest Iength I could find, good for life I guess, and got to sewing.

It took a few hours, but happy with it.

I didn't know the case was 2 seperate pieces until I started cutting stitching, so it definitely helped after separating.

For the edges, I held the elastic in place with pins before sewing, needed a thimble to push new holes through the shell.

For the holes on back, I would sometimes stick another needle through the existing holes so I could find it with the needle on the elastic side.

Finally, I 3d printed a charger holder that works alright.
I really like the stock case so I was glad to be able to restore it.

If you need to replace yours, I’d say go for it!

To pre-empt the obvious solutions, (even though I know some of you illiterates are gonna suggest them anyway) I already tried “Steam+B”, the sleep button doesn’t give me a log out prompt, L5 isn’t bringing up a menu, I have no mouse pointer, and Left d-pad and steam isn’t working either. At this pointed I’m tempted to let it just run out of battery but that’s gonna take forever as I put the screen on darkest level.
Yes I tried to restart it with the power button, it only brought me back to this menu

I have been playing FC2026 via Amazon Luna. I installed Luna using nonsteamlauncher and can access Luna from the game mode. I would like to launch straight into FC2026. Is there a way to add it as a game?

In case you’ve been waiting, I’ve had email notifications set up for a while but didn’t get one. It looks like they are a different listing, with a new outrageous price. If you need or want an official one, I guess that’s the way.

Not sure if I need one as bad as they seem to think with the new price though.

Just changed the battery and it felt like I was torturing my deck, what an unpleasant experience

Hi! You might remember me from a few days ago. Turns out, the guide I posted was missing some very important information, so heres an updated version!

Shin Gyakuten Touhou is an old doujinshi Touhou fan-game released in 2009. It is a parody of the Ace Attorney series, using Touhou characters. You can download 6 of the games off one big file on Internet Archive, which I obviously won’t provide the link for obvious reasons, but… you’ll find it. This guide will assume that you’re using it, but even if you aren’t, it should still (hopefully) work.

So What’s Included In The File?

• Shin Gyakuten Touhou
• Shin Gyakuten Touhou 2
• Shin Gyakuten Touhou 3
• Shin Gyakuten Touhou Festival
• Shin Gyakuten Touhou Extra
• Shin Gyakuten Touhou Gaiden
• And their respective english patches*.

NOTE: Shin Gyakuten Touhou’s english patch isn’t included in the file by mistake, but you can find it in another IA post.

NOTE 2: Shin Gyakuten Touhou Gaiden’s english patch isn’t anywhere on Internet archive, but instead on shrinemaiden.

STEP 1: Patching

Now that you have all your patches, put the patch files in the folders of the games they correspond to. DO NOT put the patch folders themselves in the game, as this will break it. JUST the patch.

STEP 2: Adding It As A Non-Steam Game

Plus icon in the bottom of the screen -> add a non-steam game -> select the exes -> properties -> compatibility -> force the use of a specific steam compatibly tool -> whichever proton version you want.

Note: just as an aside, if you wanna customize your non-steam games, use https://www.steamgriddb.com. It doesn’t have Shin Gyakuten Touhou stuff, but it’s still a nice help!

STEP 3: Japanese Locales

Since Shin Gyakuten Touhou was made to run on Japanese Machines, so as with most old-school touhou fan-games, it only works with Japanese locales. You’ll see a lot of PC users tell you that you need to download a locale emulator, but, thankfully, with the power of a Steam Deck, we can just bypass all of that with a simple launch command.

PROTON_LOG=1 env LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 %command%

Run this, and it should work perfectly fine.

STEP 4: Play The Game And Then Get Mad When You Can’t Save

And there you have it! You can now play Shin Gyakuten Touhou, in English, on your steam deck. Hope you enjoy it!

…is what I said at the end of this guide originally. Yeah, turns out, because Shin Gyakuten Touhou is a SUPER old game that wasn’t supposed to run on anything but Japanese windows computers, the way saves work on Linux is a little messed up. I spent FIVE ENTIRE DAYS trying to fix this and still only have a shotty half-fix.

Veteran Ace Attorney fans will know this, but Shin Gyakuten Touhou’s cases are split into “segments”:

Prologue Investigation 1 Pre-trial Trial 1 Etc, etc.

On Linux, when you save, instead of saving the spot that you’re in, it saves the segment you’re in. So, if you save at a specific point in the prologue, and then load, instead of loading the point you’re at, it’ll load the beginning of the prologue. So, you have to shotgun every segment, basically. I’ve tried far and wide to fix this, but I just, can’t. If anyone has any ideas, that’d be greatly appreciated.

STEP 5: Play The Game For Real Now

If you’re willing to get past that, then congratulations, you’ve successfully got Shin Gyakuten Touhou working on your deck. I’ve successfully replicated this multiple times, so this should be the definitive way to get it working. Enjoy the game!

If anyone has any questions, let me know!

Okay i did the exact same for those two videos
https://youtu.be/SQYp6prSf88?si=JYx7nzoPYCmgr2SG
https://youtu.be/YUXx1lnmPik?si=8EPw_GRSOeeLC9lj

And i trued both the latest update from proton Ge and proton craunchy,

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG ??
The luancher open i downloded the game but when i hit play it is just a black screen nothing else appear ?

UPDATE!! The game opend when i used my own data hotspot idk why even tho it is slower than the house wifi ???

I lose 15-20% over 24 hours while my Deck is asleep. Seems odd, but maybe it's normal? Does anyone else experience this? I'm wondering if possibly a Decky plugin could be causing it.

I genuinely like the Gamesir Tegenaria controller more than any other controller I have (Xbox, PS4, Switch Pro, etc), but for one problem - when it's plugged into the dock, and I put the Deck to sleep, when the Deck comes back on, I have to unplug and plug it back in to get it to recognise it. This seems bananas to me. Is this a problem with wired controllers generally?

I‘m new to the steam deck, and it seems like the only way to focus on containers is by moving the thumb sticks, which is very limiting if not occasionally impossible for highlighting certain containers. Help me out- what’s the trick?