Steam Deck: what type of games excel on it?
We've got (of course!) data. Also: news and this week's Steam releases.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
It’s a busy - and sometimes chaotic - time out there in game discoveryland. But fear ye not - GameDiscoverCo is here to show you data, type nurturingly at you, and generally be your concierge in the world of ‘wait, what game is successful now?!’ Let’s hit it…
But before we start: “In 1992, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past… in a failsafe room discovered only through initially unknown and confusing methods is 45 blue rupees and the name ‘Chris Houlihan’.” Who is he? This YouTube mini-doc found out.
[LIKE WHAT WE DO HERE? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro!) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]
Game discovery news: Borderlands 4 gets static..
And we’re starting by mopping up the rest of the week’s game platform & discovery news - of which there’s quite a lot! Let’s check it:
The latest Footprints.gg ‘trad media’ coverage chart includes a lot of Borderlands 4 discussion - ‘aided’ by PC performance issues & a certain tech support ‘helper’. Also charting: Silksong (again), Super Mario Galaxy (due to the upcoming remaster), Battlefield 6 (again again!), Metroid Prime 4 (finally dated), and more.
A super-big deal? Fortnite announcing that in Dec. 2025, devs “will be able to sell items directly from their Fortnite islands, opening up new revenue potential, in addition to receiving engagement payouts from...item shop sales.” And through the end of 2026, you’ll get ~74% of player spend on those (as opposed to 37% after then…)
Yep, this is Epic’s Tim Sweeney finally shifting away from ‘in the metaverse, all items should be shared’ - and a major U-turn from his comments as recently as June - “The idea that somebody built a better game [in games like Roblox], and now I'm going to go to that game and have to buy everything again… That's not what players want.”
Checking out the U.S. Switch 1/2 eShop charts (recent, third-party), we see Hollow Knight: Silksong (#3, Switch 1, and #11, Switch 2) topping interest in 3-day units downloaded. Elsewhere, cozy hits Tiny Bookshop (#23), Strange Antiquities (#31), and Lego Voyagers (#39, Switch 2 SKU) are doing decently.
U.S. Congress Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R, Kentucky) has invited Steam’s Gabe Newell - as well as the CEOs of Twitch, Discord, and Reddit - to discuss “the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts” in person in Washington DC on Oct. 8th.
An interesting ‘decline of physical’ data point hidden in Sony’s 2024 Corporate Report: “In breaking down its [first/thirdparty games $] for FY2024… 29% came from Add-On Content, 20% came from digital software, and 14% came from Network Services. 24% came from Hardware… just 3% came from Physical Software.”
As TubeFilter spotted, another UK-specific Online Safety Act change from a major platform: “Twitch’s new [UK-only, for now] system requires users to submit a live scan of their face when they sign in; it uses facial recognition tech to judge the person’s age based on how they look.” (Roblox and YouTube are also doing more verification.)
Jonas Tyroller’s YouTube channel has a longform chat to Philomena Schwab, co-founder/CEO of Stray Fawn Studio (The Wandering Village.) The section dealing with The Wandering Village’s 1.0 is interesting: it hit 100k units in the first week of EA, but ‘just’ an extra 55k in the first month of 1.0. (Still great overall tho!)
Meta’s big announcements at Meta Connect were around AI and AR, rather than VR. Spyglass’ M.G. Siegler has good analysis: it’s about “Glasses; Superintelligence; Presence; Metaverse.” (And way less about games - this review of Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses & ‘Neural Band’ doesn’t mention video games even once, hm.)
The latest PlayStation 5 system update allows DualSense and DualSense Edge wireless controllers to be paired across multiple devices simultaneously, and adds Power Saver for games to (first-party published) titles like Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, Demon’s Souls, and Ghost of Yōtei.
Microlinks: coming to Xbox Game Pass for the rest of this month is Hades, Visions of Mana, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and more; Microsoft’s Xbox PC app adds Steam games and access to other stores; YouTube’s latest features are dynamically inserted ads and side-by-side ads - plus Playables (games) for live.
Steam Deck: what type of games excel on it?
Ever since Valve launched its Steam Deck portable gaming PC in Feb. 2022, it’s been a subject of interest. It plays (most of!) your Steam library, uses SteamOS - a clever version of Linux that effectively emulates Windows games - and it’s sold millions.
We covered data on the most popular games for Steam Deck last November, using a new (at the time!) trick - checking whether a user review from somebody with majority (>50%) Steam Deck play time for the game. (We looked at the top Steam Deck-reviewed games in Oct. 2024 - Balatro, Vampire Survivors, and Hades II won.)
This time around, we’re taking a different approach, and looking across all games that grossed >$1m lifetime on Steam and have >100 ‘>50% played on Steam Deck’ reviews. (Here’s the source spreadsheet, if you want to look around.) Here’s the Top 10 by the highest % of reviews that are majority Steam Deck in ‘hours played’:
So, yes if this list feels like ‘recent games that might also be popular on Switch-type devices’, you’d be right:
‘Imaginary game console catalog’ UFO 50 is #1, with 20.2% of its reviews from >50% Deck players. And the Zelda-ish Dungeons of Hinterberg (#2, 17.7%) and the cartoony, skateboard-tastic OlliOlli World (#3, 17.7%) are also high up the list.
Not all of these games hit as big as their makers wanted them to on PC. Many of them topped out at 1,000-1,500 CCU, and underperformed budget. (Perhaps some were a bit ‘primary-color’ or console-y for the core Steam desktop PC audience?)
But a chunk of them - like twin-stick shooter Minishoot Adventures (#4, 15.6%, 130k copies sold on Steam) and 1000xRESIST (#5, 15.5%, 100k+ Steam units) seem to have captured extra Steam Deck audience and still succeeded overall, based on their more limited budgets.
We’re the first to admit that ‘did you pay this game mainly on Steam Deck?’ is a bit of an unconventional filter. But it’s the only one Steam gives us right now, and we can learn things! Here’s the rest of the Top 30 by all-time reviews, for example:
We won’t go into detail with these titles - but we’re seeing a lot more bright, console-adjacent titles, from Thank Goodness You’re Here! to Castlevania and Kingdom Hearts collections, as well as indie titles like Crow Country and Cassette Beasts.
One shift: Steam is the top sales platform for more of these titles than you’d expect. We estimate even simul-released ones like Thank Goodness You’re Here have 60-65% Steam players (followed by Switch and PlayStation.) And later releases on Switch don’t always pop - we estimate Crow Country’s delayed Switch port did ~10% of Steam.
Two possible takeaways from this: first, that Steam’s incredibly international audience just has better reach. And second: perhaps some indie-friendly players who have both a Steam Deck and Switch are doing less ‘double-dipping’, and just buying the game on one platform (Steam, that is), esp. if launch timing is offset.
Anyhow, if you want a style of game that appeals to the Steam Deck audience, what type should you make? Here’s a single Steam genre tag applied to each of the Top 50 games (ignoring a couple of super-generic tags):
There’s definitely a ‘lite console’ vibe in here, right? And for an alternative review, here’s the Top 6 Steam tags of any kind for each of the Top 100 games with the most ‘majority Steam deck playtime’, excluding seldom-mentioned tags:
So those are the kind of tags you should make a game in if you want it to be Steam Deck-friendly, folks. But what’s the prize here? What’s the actual installed base and upside? Some final thoughts here:
We can look at Steam’s Hardware Survey to see what percentage of players (who participated!) are using Steam Deck, since we know the Deck’s hardware setup. It’s about 27% of Linux users (which are 2.64% of the survey respondents.) So that’s about 0.7% of total Steam users on Steam Deck. (Not giant.)
On playtime: in Oct. 2024, we said that “one publisher portfolio we’ve seen - with a mix of old and new games of various genres - has 2.65% of all playtime in the last month on Steam Deck.” ~A year later, the Deck percentage is 2.75% - not much changed.
Installed base? IDC’s Feb. 2025 estimates were around 4 million units of Steam Deck, and we speculated it was approaching 5 million units a year ago. Given these numbers, a Steam Deck installed base of between 5 and 7 million units seems about right to us. (As a comparison, Switch 2 has sold 5.82m units LTD.)
How we’d treat Steam Deck when making games? We’d a) look to games that are doing pretty decently on Steam and Switch at the same time - such as Discounty, which we’ll be covering soon, and b) think about the ‘Steam/Switch 1 & 2’ interest continuum. But we wouldn’t go ‘all-in’ on Steam Deck - the numbers are too small…
Steam this week: Dying Light, Skate go out bigger…
Next, for our GameDiscoverCo Pro & Plus subscribers, we’ll take a look at what really is an extremely busy week - 19 games at >1,000 peak CCU, maybe a record for 2025 - of debuts on Steam. Here we go: