How many of you install games outside Steam on your Decks? Do you find the process easy?
I’m a hobbyist game developer myself, and I’m looking into making games especially designed for the Steam Deck. However, for freeware games, the $100 price per title on the Steam store is a bit too steep. I wish there was an easy-to-use alternative store on the Deck, but since that’s not the case, I’m wondering if it would make any sense to develop games for the Deck and publish them, for example, on Itch.io.
(As a proof of concept, I created this step-by-step guide for a hacky Steam Deck version of my old game, Soccer Physics. I think it still applies, even though it’s a year-old build/guide: https://www.ottoojala.com/soccerphysicssteamdeck/ )
The only games I have installed outside of Steam are emulators. Even if the majority of people here tell you they have games outside of Steam, this is likely a skewed statistics because people who tinker with their deck are more likely to join a community about it. I would guess that 70/90% of people with decks have never even opened desktop mode.
To me $100 doesn’t seem that steep, if you’re making a $5 profit with your game you only need to sell 20 extra copies for it to pay itself. If your game is specifically done for the Deck your audience is by definition on the Steam store, only a few are also outside of it.
I’m someone who uses Linux daily, I like tweaking with my deck, but realistically I never even considered installing games outside of Steam because every game I want to play is on Steam, and I imagine that several other people who tweak with their Deck are also in the same boat.
As a hobbyist game dev, I don’t mind making games for a niche group of users, but I’m probably going to skip the idea of making games just for the Deck, as there isn’t really a platform for that kind of games. And in my case, I’m talking about freeware games; games that won’t be making that 5 dollar profit. But still, designing a game with the Deck especially in mind feels like a fun and fresh starting point to me :–)
Yeah, in that case it makes sense not to put it on Steam.
Although in your shoes I would put it on Steam for something like $5 and free on itch. Afaik Steam doesn’t mind this as long as you don’t offer a steam key for free on itch, but if you charge the same value as on Steam you can offer a key there as well, so you could do free version on itch but a minimum of $5 to get a steam key, and sell it on steam for $5. Whatever you can sell on steam is likely to surpass the $100 margin. But I can see that as a hobbyist you might not care to setup accounts for payments etc, just want to get your game out there.
In any case I’m interested in what a game specifically designed for the Deck would look like, so please post a link when you have published it.
Personally, I’m just not into that solo game dev career anymore, been there done that. It’d basically require for me to start up my own business again, thanks to Finnish laws. Good point about the steam keys, hadn’t thought about those at all :–)
I have no solid plans for a game specifically designed for the Deck yet, but I’m really into local multiplayer games, and do think a game that you play on a shared Deck might be cool. For example a game with just joystick controls - one stick for each player. My background is in making local multiplayer mobile games and I feel the same kind of games would work just fine on a Steam Deck, too, with the hardware controls adding new possibilities for designs.