Steam Deck gets lots of game dev love – should Nintendo be worried?

techradar.com:

As Valve’s Steam Deck prepares for launch later this month – it starts shipping at the end of February – some very positive comments have been forthcoming from game developers who’ve been playing with pre-release dev (testing) units.

As PC Gamer reports, a good example is the maker of Valheim, the popular survival game (still in early access). Jonathan Smars, a programmer and designer at Iron Gate, commented: “I was surprised how well games work on [Steam Deck] without any changes, and how good it feels to play on it. Valheim worked from day one on Steam Deck without any changes.”

@Valheimgame is ready for the Steam Deck from @valvesoftware! It's a very impressive piece of machinery. I'm looking forward to the release and playing Valheim on the go with my friends! @Steam @OnDeck pic.twitter.com/vX8KcR7arCJanuary 24, 2022

The programmer did clarify that visual details needed to be dropped somewhat compared to playing on a high-end PC – which is hardly unexpected – but that he was “still impressed with what such a small handheld can handle without any platform specific optimizations.”

That’s good to hear, and Smars is far from a lone voice out there. PC Gamer observes that many of the developers they spoke to were confident of a smooth launch for the Steam Deck as regards the software side of the equation.

Granted, there will be issues – inevitably with any new device, especially one relying on a compatibility layer (Proton) to run Windows games – and some devs pointed to potential problems with some titles struggling to detect the Steam Deck as a controller, and possible interface issues (like navigating the Steam library, if it’s a sprawling affair, with no search function available).

Other devs talked about needing to tweak