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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

As a former owner of a Steam controller:

Do games just work like a console? Or do I have to mess around like on a PC?

I’m old, and don’t have time to game. I don’t want to spend 20 minutes of the first hour in a settings menu.

Many games have a console-like experience where it just works, no settings, just go into the game. The resolution, and all other settings will have been preselected for best experience on the deck. Steam exposes that in the UI with a "Verified for steam deck" logo. Other games have a "partial compatibility logo". Steam further automatically exposes a "great on deck" collection of my existing steam library, which is approximately a quarter of my library of games going back to 2003.

This and all the other similar responses are awesome. Valve clearly learnt a lot - Steam Controller had no support in the actual store (no 'made for steam controller' program) and half the time you'd be staring at 'press z' holding a controller in your hand trying to remember that x was z right now.

One of the criteria for the "verified" badge seems to be that the game UI has correct button labels for actions, and everything needed for a normal game experience is available on the controller.

For the 2nd tier (I think they called it "supported"), the defaults may not expose everything (e.g. in-game text chat kinda implies keyboard), but what is exposed tends to be good. If your eyesight is less than stellar, the built-in screen can be tiny for "PC-style" game text, but plugging into a monitor fixes that.

And then there's community control schemes, on top of that. E.g. the default bindings generally don't use the back buttons, and community bindings can be more comfortable and productive for a non-novice player.

My experience has been very console like, in that every game I've downloaded just works. 99% of the time there is no fiddling with graphic or control settings, no nothing. Just hit download, launch the game, have fun.

Ocasionally you get a glimpse of the underlying PC-nature of the thing. Once I had to choose one of the community-provided control schemes for a mouse-heavy tabletop game (so even then, pretty straightforward).

I was able to install Elden Ring and play without any changes. It carried over my save from my PC. It just worked. Same with Vampire Survivors. I use these two as examples because they are opposites of one another in terms of resources. If ER and VS can both provide games that work out of the box with the Steam Deck, then it really falls on the games developer, and really, do they support controllers?

Steam makes it clear what works well with the Steam Deck. Not everything does for various reasons, but if you stay with what works well, my experience is you'll be fine.

For the most part it just works, especially if the game can autodetect your hardware and adjust graphics accordingly. But of course you can always tinker with settings in game and out to get more optimized performance. Also, you might have to mess with Steam Input to translate the Deck's controls to what the game expects, and although the built-in community sharing system makes that usually pretty easy I still have to pause and reference my controls every once in a while. It's not quite console-levels of plug-and-play due to the flexibility of games in the PC market, but it's about the closest you can get

> I don’t want to spend 20 minutes of the first hour in a settings menu.

Get a console (PS5, Switch, Xbox), they cater to alleviating exactly that!

Haha, until your PS5 demands a 40min patch to start the game. It's become almost a meme.... All the updates if you don't use those regularly and they don't stay in standby.

> until your PS5 demands a 40min patch to start the game.

Never saw that happen yet or even heard of that as a meme. Even if it does happen it would still be less jank than PC upkeep :)

You probably pay monthly for their subscription service. With that, you can have it wake and auto-patch everything at night. At least, when I signed up back on the PS3, a subscription was required for that feature—maybe it's not anymore. Otherwise, it'd just hit you with the update when you tried to play.

It'll still happen when you bring a new game home on disk, though. Plug in to play: "hold on while we patch for an hour". More or less, depending on your internet connection speed. Certainly none of the gaming services ever come close to saturating my gigabit connection, though, so there's a practical cap on how much that helps.

more like a console, except for games that don't support gamepads at all - but then you will probably have someone who created a specific configuration for them, that's available for the game in question

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