Some prospective Steam Deck owners have apparently been getting a little too excited about how much of the Steam library will be compatible with the

The Steam Deck won’t actually run your entire Steam library, Proton president reminds everyone

submited by

Style Pass

2021-09-08 00:30:02

Some prospective Steam Deck owners have apparently been getting a little too excited about how much of the Steam library will be compatible with the handheld PC when it launches. It’s actually rather unlikely that every Steam game will readily work, according to James B. Ramey, president of software dev outfit CodeWeavers.

Alongside Valve, CodeWeavers co-developed Proton, a compatibility layer that empowers the Steam Deck’s Linux-based SteamOS to run Windows games. The issue, as far as compatibility is concerned, is that not every Steam game will play nice with Proton straight out of its digital box. Nevertheless, Ramey told the Boiling Steam podcast that folks may be getting the wrong idea, and may be expecting the Steam Deck to be compatible with their entire games collection immediately.

The confusion seems to stem from an IGN interview with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais. Speaking specifically about the Steam Deck’s hardware muscle, Griffais said "This is the first time we've achieved the level of performance that is required to really run the latest generation of games without problems. All the games we wanted to be playable is, really, the entire Steam library. We haven't really found something we could throw at this device that it couldn't handle."