Something that has been floating around the social networks this week is the Steam Replay. I do not remember this existing in past years, so it seems like this is something brand new for Steam and they appear to be taking a page from Spotify which has a similar practice. If you are curious you can look at my full replay here, but this morning I figured I would talk about it a bit. I do my own tracking thing that I am currently working on, but I do appreciate Steam handing me so much information on a platter. I tend to devote a certain amount of time in the last few posts of the year to reviewing the year as a whole and this flows right into that pattern. Steam creates a number of handy infographics ready for you to download and share on social media. The above image is “formatted for Twitter” but they also have a square format for Instagram if that is more your thing.
The first tidbit that I find interesting is just how high my session count is. I think this can be accounted for by two different behaviors that happen to me a lot. Firstly I often get into a game and then something comes up… cat knocks something over… wife needs my help… and I have to bail out of the game quickly. This is entirely why I bounced off Deathloop because that game refuses to let me save out quickly and return just as quickly to what I was doing. After failing to complete a stage three times because I kept getting interrupted I uninstalled the game and move on with my life. The other part of this is that I boot up a lot of games… and then do nothing with them. Sometimes I suffer from the “I have nothing to wear” syndrome where I have so many games but nothing quite sounds right. So before I settle in on something and hyper-focus for several days, I will often flail about trying to find the “right” game to play.
The thing that honestly shocks me with this one is the number of achievements. I realize in January and February I did burn through like twelve games in rapid fire, and honestly, that is probably why that number is so high. That is not exactly my normal pattern because in general, I do not give a fuck about achievements. I say that… but I am now going after a truly stupid achievement in Path of Exile that involves me playing a character up to Hillock and then logging out, and coming back and trying it again after the map resets all for the purpose of attempting to get a unique drop in that first map. I am not shocked that I spent most of my time playing either New World or Path of Exile because those really were the games of “this” year for me. Witcher 3 is so high because I poured into doing as close to 100% of the content run as I could when I was doing my “play everything to completion” thing at the start of the year.
I knew I was somewhat “out of band” in the sheer number of games I play in a given year… but I did not realize I was that far off. If I take this statement as evidence of how most people consume games, it would make me believe that the average gamer just plays a handful of games. The streak is interesting because I am almost certain that is New World, and it in truth should be longer because Steam tracks the Live client and the PTR client as separate games. There was a period of time when I was playing the PTR client every single day, and then when Brimstone Sands launched I switched over to playing Live again. The achievement count again I am certain is because in Dec/Jan/Feb I burned through a lot of single-player games.
This graphic shows how my gameplay stacks up as compared to new releases, recent releases, and what it calls a classic game… aka anything that is more than eight years old. I am sure some folks would bicker about the definition of “classic games” there, but I guess for me it makes sense. I do spend a lot of time jumping on the bandwagon of a brand-new game as it launches, but apparently only about a third of my gameplay is spent in that manner. I would have thought it was higher, to be honest. It does make sense that the bulk of my time is spent on games that release in the last few years because I often miss the launch and eventually get around to checking out the game a few years later. I think this is a side effect of how hyper-focused I can get on a single game and how I mostly push everything else aside when I am in that mode. Then there are just so damned many games coming out each year that it takes me a while to digest that they came out and get around to playing them.
This one confuses me quite a bit. Usually, when I see a graph like this, it denotes something like quadrants that are universal for everyone. This is clearly chosen from the games that I actually played during the year because no one would lay out a personality matrix based on these traits. It makes a lot of sense that MMORPG, Looter Shooter, and Medieval are so high on the list. That little corner seems to be my sweet spot. What I am shocked about is how high the Souls-like games are showing up on the list, but I guess that makes sense as well because I keep trying them… and then bouncing off them. Cyberpunk would be a much larger segment if I actually had bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. I own it on GOG instead which means none of my playtimes is getting logged here. Dark Comedy though… no clue where that one is coming from because while yes I do love that genre I am not sure which games that I played this last year are contributing to that.
I am still working on my larger “Grand Experiment” post that I make each year, in which I have been tracking monthly play patterns since 2012. I thought it would be fun to talk through some of the things on my Steam Replay this year in the meantime. Valve has this bad habit of starting things and not necessarily carrying through with them, but I am hoping that this becomes a yearly tradition. I personally find evaluating my habits interesting, and it has been really cool to see some of the Replays of my friends. What are your thoughts? Did you enjoy the Steam Replay as a concept? Feel free to drop me a line below. I am not exactly sure WHEN I will make my big post, but given the trajectory, it is likely on Friday.
Good Morning Friends! I have to admit I have slowed down a bit on my whole “Steam Deck Nonsense” largely because I will not get my upgraded storage until early October. After reviewing my options I decided to go with an OEM drive originally designed for the Microsoft Surface, but provides 1TB of storage and fits the 2230 single-sided form factor required by the Steam Deck. This seemed to provide the most bang for the buck as 2TB drives are a wee bit out of my price range for the moment sitting around $600. Over time it is a certainty that the price will go down, but 1TB appears to be the largest reasonable option for the 2230 form factor. If you ONLY care about parity with the highest stock Steam Deck unit… you can pick up the 512GB for around $20.
So let’s play a game and talk about the total cost of what my unit is going to ultimately be versus the highest stock model. We know that the premium version comes with a special anti-glare screen treatment and 512 GB of internal storage. My unit will have 1TB of internal storage, so roughly twice the space but for sake of this experiment we are only going to see if my upgraded version could beat the price of the stock premium version. Let’s add up the components that I have added or will be adding to my unit.
Base 64GB eMMC Steam Deck – $399.00
WD PC SN530 M.2 2230 SSD 1TB NVMe – $134.60
Anti-Glare Screen Protector – $3.33 ($9.99 in a 3 pack)
So my finished unit is going to be $536.93 and will have a similar anti-glare screen with the benefit of it being a screen protector and having twice the internal storage and still come in $112.07 cheaper than the deluxe model. If you add in the 512 GB SD card I am also using with the unit, and the 20,000mAh power bank that I am using with the unit, you end up around price parity. However, you end up with a package that allows me to recharge the Steam Deck three times and have three times the storage capacity. Basically, I still think it is well worth the investment of time, to go with that base model and upgrade yourself and the pricing for storage will only get cheaper over time.
Installing Decky and Power Tools
Like I said before, I have slowed down configuring items on the Steam Deck that require a novel application of my time. My theory is that I should be able to clone my existing hard drive onto the much larger 1TB model when it comes in, but in case that fails… I don’t want to get too deep into the woods that it will be a challenge to bring my unit back up to where I am currently. If I have to wipe and start from scratch, I have a relatively minimal investment timewise currently. There is one thing however that I have been using quite a bit and have not really talked about and that is Power Tools. Essentially Decky is a plugin manager, and Power Tools is the default plugin that installs which allows you to modify various system settings on a game-by-game basis. This is terribly useful especially when it comes to emulation because it seems if you throttle the total core count it increases the speed that each individual core runs at.
Unlike most mods we might add to the Steam Deck, we are actually going to begin in Game Mode. The first step is that we need to go into Settings and the System menu and enable Developer Mode. Be very careful when you are in this menu because Format SD Card is located precariously below the option we need to toggle on shown in the screenshot above. Enabling Developer Mode is different from say unlocking your file system, and is a relatively safe operation.
Once enabled, you will now have a new option in the settings menu all the way at the bottom labeled Developer. In this screen, you are going to specifically toggle on something labeled “CEF Remote Debugging”. This is what allows Decky to install plugins from the storefront. Incidentally, while you are in this menu, you might also want to untick “Enable Wifi Power Management” because one of the problems with the Steam Deck is that in order to save battery life, it often drastically reduces WiFi transmit strength.
Next up we need to actually install Decky. In order to install this, we are going to need our old friend the console app, which means you will need to boot into Desktop Mode. As always you will have needed to set a password with the “passwd” command that I covered in a previous article. Next up we are going to get the install command for Decky from the project GitHub page. You are going to paste the following command into Konsole:
curl -L https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader/raw/main/dist/install_prerelease.sh | sh
This will install Decky to your steam deck. You will be prompted to enter the password that you set previously with the passwd command. Once everything finishes, reboot your device which will load into Game Mode by default. You have to reboot in order for the plugin to take effect, so simply returning to Game Mode is not sufficient.
If everything went as expected, you should see a new menu icon at the bottom of the menu when you click the “…” button. This will be where all Decky plugins can be located, and by default, you will have a single plugin loaded called PowerTools.
At the top of this menu on the right hand side next to the name Decky, you will now also have a storefront page that allows you to browse and install plugins. The storefront will allow you to install an addon or select a previous version if for some reason something is not supported in the most current version. I’ve never had to do this and for the most part, just install the latest version of everything. I guess let’s talk a bit about the plugins that I personally find useful.
vibrantDeck
VibrantDeck is essentially a very rudimentary version of a tool like ReShade for the Steam Deck. You can configure it globally like I have, just to increase the color saturation a bit, or enable per-game profiles for more granular control. While you can’t do some of the crazy screen effects like you can with ReShade, you can steak the settings to make the Steam Deck image a little more pleasing to your preferences. I personally feel like by default the Steam Deck is a little bit desaturated, and this can resolve that easily.
CSS Loader
CSS Loader essentially allows you to style the theme elements of the Deck as well as configure various visual tweaks. For example, if you scroll back up to the first image in this post, you will notice that all of my Deck icons have a slightly rounded edge to them. I achieved this by installing the Round theme element which allows you to control the curve intensity on most images. I also have one that similarly applies a rounded effect to the virtual keyboard that overrides my existing rainbow keyboard theme. There are a bunch of themes that folks have created that do various things, so it is well worth spending some time browsing. I personally landed on Obsidian because it is essentially the default theme of the Steam Deck with the ability to change the background colors.
DeckFAQs
This one is admittedly a bit frivolous, but I come from an era when GameFAQs mattered. This essentially gives you rapid access to text-based game guides from within steam. By default, it will take whatever game you are playing as the search parameter, but you can also submit your own queries. Ultimately if you click through to a guide it will load the full text-based guide in an overlay window on the deck. Admittedly you could do ALL of this on your phone, and would probably have a better experience but I mostly installed the plugin for nostalgia sake and for those rare times when I am playing something that I want a walkthrough on like FFV for tidbits of information I might not remember when doing a playthrough.
ProtonDB Badges
This one is pretty straightforward, but it allows you to apply the compatibility information to your hover-over effect on Steam games. This will tell you quickly if a game is fully compatible, works with issues, or is not supported at all. Steam maintains a list of games that are completely verified to work with the Deck, but often times most of your library has some support that might require something as simple as occasionally doing mouse input with the trackpad. What you really care about however is how well the game might run, and there is an external resource called ProtonDB that does this.
If you look at 7 Days to Die in your library you see the standard information icon, that you can click through and get additional information.
If you click through to the game profile, you can now see a ProtonDB badge in the top left corner of the profile indicating that the game has been platinum certified to run under proton.
If you want even MORE information, you can click on the badge and it will bring up the full game profile on ProtonDB. In this case for example it shows that 7 Days to Die not only runs under Proton, but it actually natively supports Linux, so the game should run excellently.
The Steam Deck continues to be a phenomenal piece of hardware that walks that line between ease of use and enthusiast shenanigans. Like I said I am mostly in a holding pattern as I wait for storage before I go too much deeper down this rabbit hole. Probably my next wave of modifications will be to get specific games working on the deck. I want to try and get Final Fantasy XIV, GW2, and World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha running. All of those will require a specific brand of nonsense that I do not relish doing a second time if my clone disk idea does not work as intended.
Good morning friends! Friday and throughout the weekend I attempted to mark another thing off my Steam Deck ToDo list. This morning I am going to do a half-assed job of walking you through how I got a sizeable number of emulators up and running on my device. Essentially I am leaning heavily upon something called EmuDeck, which is less an emulator and more a series of scripts that configure emulators for you, and install what you need to add all of the individual games to steam. If things go successfully you end up with something similar to the above screenshot, with beautiful images representing each game and the ability to launch them directly from steam while in game mode. I am going to attempt to walk you through the logical order of getting things set up.
Installing EmuDeck
The first thing that you need to do is download EmuDeck. This is going to work much better if you launch your web browser of choice while in Desktop Mode on your steam deck. Visit https://www.emudeck.com/ and click on the download menu option, then the download app button. This will drop an executable package in your download folder by default.
Open up the Dolphin file browser and browse to your download directory. Before you can do anything you are going to need to open up properties on the item that just downloaded and click over to the permissions tab and make sure “Is Executable” is checked. Once you have done this double-click the file and this should begin the install process for EmuDeck.
I am not going to walk you through the entire setup process for EmuDeck, there are other guides out there like the above video that do a much better job of this. Essentially there are two choices that matter, the first is if you want to do the Easy setup or the Expert setup. The Easy setup will have very minimal options and largely just configure everything for you. It will however skip a few things that might be useful, like a drive for gyro controls that you can use with the switch/wiiu emulators. The expert mode will require keyboard input however so make sure you are at minimum remoting into your deck through the steam link like that I talked about last week. The other major choice will be if you want to install it to your local storage or an SD card. I chose the latter for reasons I will get into later, there can be significant problems if you fill up your internal storage.
Enabling SFTP for File Transfer
In theory, EmuDeck just installed a slew of folders and emulators on your device, but next, you are going to have to transfer some ROM files before you can make any meaningful progress. I am not going to tell you how to acquire ROM files, other than to say that you should dump your own ROMs for legal reasons. In order to get the files over to your deck, we are going to need some reliable method of transfer. I looked into a large number of options, but given that the Steam deck is just a Linux device, the most straightforward seems to be enabling SSH and then using SFTP. If you are following along my journey you should have set a password for your device. If you have not done that yet, please refer back to my previous article. Type the following command into Konsole:
sudo systemctl enable sshd
This will prompt you to enter the password for your account, and when you do so it will enable the SSH daemon to start on boot. However, in order to get this running the first time, you will need to restart your steam deck and we have one step to check while we are in Game Mode, so don’t go right back into Desktop Mode quite yet.
You should know your password, but we need to verify while in game mode what your console hostname is set to. The default for this is “steamdeck” but in theory, while you were configuring other options you might have changed this not understanding what it is used for. To check what your hostname is go to settings > system and scroll down until you find an argument called hostname. You can see in the above screenshot that mine is still set to the default which is “steamdeck”.
Next, you are going to need an SFTP client, and this is entirely your choice. There are many options, but I just happened to have Filezilla because I have been using it for decades. Ultimately in order to connect to your Steam Deck you need the following information:
Host – you should have just seen that in the previous step
Port – you should be able to leave this blank, but if your client requires this set enter port 22.
User – you should enter “deck” for your username.
Password – the system password that you configured previously in Konsole.
If this works you should be connected to the filesystem of your steam deck remotely. By default, you will be in the /home/deck/ directory, but you should be able to change this to wherever you need to go. If you chose to install EmuDeck to your SD Card and formatted your SD Card in the steam deck… you should be able to reach those files from the following path:
/run/media/mmcblk0p1
If you chose to install EmuDeck to your local storage, then the path for you should be the following:
/home/deck/emudeck/backend
In theory, you are going to be spending all of your time in either /roms or /bios and in the ROMs directory EmuDeck will have stubbed out the correct folder structure for each system. Copy your legally obtained ROM files into these directories and we can proceed with the next steps. If you are using the internal storage of your device, please be careful not to copy too much data during this process. Keep a close eye on the storage limits for your device. If you fill the internal storage and the system does not have enough room to write temporary files, it will appear bricked and go into a bootup loop. I will talk a bit about that later, this is fixable.
Configuring your Games
Boot back into Desktop Mode, and EmuDeck should have dropped a shortcut to something called the Steam Rom Manager onto your desktop. For this step, I had to find a screenshot from the internet because running the Rom Manager will disconnect Steam LInk. You will need to complete this step on the physical hardware or through some sort of port replicator that doesn’t rely on Steam Link. Essentially you want to click the Preview tab in the sidebar, then click the Generate App List button that appears at the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen, there will be a countdown of sorts for “Remaining Providers” once this reaches zero you can click the “Save App List” button at the bottom and every game that the Rom Manager has found will be registered with Steam as a new game.
At this point, I suggest you close the Rom Manager and open Steam while in desktop mode on your device. This will re-enable Steam Link and allow you to connect back in remotely again, which is highly suggested for this next step. We are going to return to our old friend Boilr, that I talked about in the previous article. It is my experience that the results of what Steam Rom Manager files for images, is going to be very hit and miss. As a result, I used Boilr to plug any gaps that the Manager failed to find images for. This is going to be very time-consuming because each time you set an image and go back to the listing of games… it will reset your position back to the top of the list causing you to endlessly scroll to find where you left off. However, the end result was very “worth it” for me because it gives me pretty images for each game on my list.
Once you have finished setting all of the game images, click the button at the bottom of the screen with the Controller and Steam icon. This will export all of your game data to Steam so that it shows up correctly when you are in game mode. If you boot back into Game Mode, you will in theory see a bunch of grid images in place of the ugly grey rectangles and get an interface that looks something like the image at the beginning of this post. Now you should be able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your effort.
Troubleshooting Issues
Ultimately you are going to get some games and more specifically platforms… to work without any issues. Others are going to require a lot of troubleshooting to get working correctly. Currently, I have the following platforms working under the combination of emulators that this process installs.
Dreamcast
Gameboy Advance
Genesis
Nintendo
Nintendo 64
PlayStation
PSP
Super Nintendo
Turbografx 16
Of the emulators that I have moved data over to the SD Card for, I cannot seem to get 32X and Sega CD working, but have also not spent a ton of time troubleshooting those. Thankfully on the EmuDeck GitHub page, there is a cheat sheet of sorts that lists what types of ROMs and Archives each emulator will support. This is not 100% correct at all times, however, because for Dreamcast it clearly states that it will support 7zip archives, and the Rom Manager identified those games… but I could not get ANY of the Dreamcast games to load until I extracted them to individual directories.
The biggest thing that you will run into with any of the semi-modern consoles is that they require a BIOS image in order to work. This is essentially how emulator developers get around the copyrighted portions of code, but rely on you to acquire a legally dumped boot image. You will have to research what is needed for each system, but once I supplied the correct BIOS for Dreamcast and Playstation those games started working beautifully. I need to put in some research into how DuckStation handles multidisk games, because right now the only PS1 game that I have copied over that is working, is Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
So You Bricked Your Steam Deck
This is not my image, but I absolutely went through this when I copied files to the wrong location. Essentially it is possible to get into a boot loop where you just see a cursor… before rebooting again and it goes on forever. Essentially in my case, this was caused by getting confused and accidentally flooding my internal storage with ROMs… eating up all of the remaining space. As I said earlier if you fill your internal storage too full and the system cannot create certain temporary files on boot… it will get stuck in this loop.
Thankfully Valve foresaw this happening and has provided bootable media that can fix it. The Steam Recovery disk is in theory designed to allow you to reinstall the operating system or nuke your home directory, but it is so much more valuable than that. It is essentially a “live” version of SteamOS that boots from removable storage. Thankfully I had spare SD Cards laying around, and in order to use that method, it requires at least 8GB of storage. You can in theory also do this off a bootable thumb drive connected to the USB C port via an A to C adapter of some sort.
How I got around NOT deleting all of my progress, was that while in the Live OS I just opened up Dolphin and browsed to the directory where I had copied the ROMs… then deleted them. After doing this make sure you also remove them from the Trash as they will still be taking up disk space until you have done this step. In theory, you should be able to reboot and your pricey toy comes back to life. If you did something more severe to bung up your system, you can use the disk to reinstall the base operating system from scratch. As I said I did not want to take this step if I could help it, because it would have undone all of the work I had already finished on getting things running on my device.
What’s Next?
I think the next big thing that is on my radar is getting both PlayStation remote play and Xbox remote play working. Other than that, however, I think my Deck is in a pretty good state. I want to fiddle around a bit more with the emulators that I technically have installed but are not working for whatever reason. The big one for me would be able to get Breath of the Wild working with durability cheats, and maybe work a bit on getting some 3DS games loading successfully.
I think everything else is probably going to wait until I get my 1TB m.2 drive from eBay. I picked up an M.2 to USB adapter and I have high hopes of using it and Clonezilla to effectively clone all of my progress from my 64GB internal drive to the new 1TB internal. I mostly don’t want to do too much effort if I know I might possibly have to start over from scratch again with a fresh operating system install. Thankfully however I already have the recovery disk primed to install the operating system fresh on the new drive if it comes to that.
Yesterday I set a list of things that I wanted to do in pretty short order in order to get things that are not steam up and running on my new deck. Yesterday I managed to accomplish four of them, and this morning I am going to walk you through the process of getting things up and running. This will not necessarily be a straightforward tutorial, because there are a few tools along the way that makes the entire process much easier. However as you can see in the above screenshot I have Cyberpunk 2077 installed from GOG, Ooblets installed from the Epic Game Store, Stadia streaming configured, and Xbox Cloud Gaming configured. This morning I am going to talk you through how to do each of them.
Using Steam Link for Remote Desktop
First things first, I highly suggest you grab the stand-alone Steam Link application. While under normal circumstances, this would allow you to play your steam games on another machine. In this specific case, we are going to use it as a remote desktop application. You can connect to your Steam Deck while in desktop mode, and gain access to the keyboard and mouse from your computer which will greatly speed up data input. The only thing that does not work is cut and paste… and I have been using a Google Doc as swap space that I can have open both on the Steam Deck and my Desktop as a way of passing inputs back and forth. This video covers the mobile steam link setup, but it is going to function much the same way and should help you through the pairing process if you have never completed it.
Once you have set up Steam link, you should be able to flip your device into Desktop Mode through the power menu and then connect to it like a Linux desktop. In theory, you should now see a screen something similar to the above with some icons in the taskbar. The first thing we are going to need to do is to launch the discover app. It should be the third icon from the left that looks like a blue shopping bag. This application is essentially a Linux app store and allows you to very easily download and install applications. We are essentially going to grab two things… Microsoft Edge and a piece of software called Boiler.
Downloading Edge and Boilr
Once in the discover app you can either type “Edge” into the search bar or filter down by application type and Edge will be located under Applications > Internet > Web Browsers. Please note the very first time you load Discover, it will take a very long time for the applications to show up. It seems to be downloading some databases in the background. If you get to a screen that says something to the effect of no applications found, close the app and relaunch it. We are specifically downloading Edge as our web browser because Microsoft did a really cool thing and added native support for the Steam Deck as a controller, which means we won’t have to manually map inputs as though we were using a keyboard.
While we are in Discover, go ahead and download an app called “Boilr”. I found out about this application through this video, but essentially it is a helper application that assists in registering games with the Steam Deck and adding custom artwork. It will automagically import games that were installed through Heroic Games Launcher, which I will talk about a little bit later but also be extremely helpful in making our cloud streaming links look reasonable. It has a database of artwork that you can search through and pick which image you want to use for the games on your deck.
Configuring Xbox Cloud Gaming
Now that we have Microsoft Edge and Boilr installed, we are going to begin the process of setting up Xbox Cloud Gaming first. While still in the desktop mode we are going to need to do a few things to make sure that Microsoft Edge has access to your controller. This is going to require you to input some console commands, which is in part why I suggested configuring Steam Link so you had access to a keyboard. This is all going to use an application that can be found in the System menu called Konsole, which is the KDE Shell application. The very first thing we have to do is set a password for our steam deck account. This process is initiated with the following command:
passwd
When you type that in and hit enter, it will prompt you to submit a new password. You will not be able to see your key input, this is normal. Hit enter and it will prompt you to verify the password you just input, which again will not echo your keypresses to the screen by default. If you successfully typed the same password twice you should now have your password configured. Remember this, you will need to use it any time you issue a command that requires elevated access.
Next up we are going to have to give the Microsoft Edge browser permission to use the controller. Thankfully Microsoft is being awesome in this case and has given us a guide that we can follow to do this entire process. While still in the console application you need to type the following, or open the web article above and paste it into the command line:
If you are in the console session that you just opened and set your password, it should execute without issue. If you are in a new session it will prompt you to enter your password. When you do so it should execute and then we are ready to start setting up the shortcuts.
Now we are going to launch Steam while still in Desktop Mode, and add a “Non-Steam Game to My Library”. In the dialogs that follow, choose Microsoft Edge, and this instance of Edge is where we are going to configure Xbox Cloud Gaming. Once you’ve successfully added Edge to your library, find it on the lefthand side menu of your games, and choose properties.
The first thing we want to do is change the name from Microsoft Edge to something like “Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)”. This naming is largely so that we will have an easier time finding images for it later in boilr. The final step before being able to test this is to configure the launch options. By default the launch parameters for Microsoft Edge looks like this:
run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=/app/bin/edge --file-forwarding com.microsoft.Edge @@u @@
This will launch the browser directly into XCloud and allow you to begin streaming. Now while still in Steam Desktop Mode, we want to test this out. Essentially everything that you do in Desktop mode, you are going to need to launch it at least once to make sure it is working as expected. Close out of any existing copies of Edge and give the new shortcut you just created a spin.
If done correctly you will get the Xbox Cloud Gaming website launched full screen. It is likely going to require you to log into it the first time but should remember your information each time you launch it from that point forward. Before we go back to game mode, there is one last thing we want to do in order to make the experience slightly better.
Now you want to launch Boiler, and if you click on the images tab you should see a section stubbed out for “Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta)”. If you click into that section it should allow you to configure an image for each of the display areas within Steam aka the Hero, Grid, Big Picture, etc images. When you are finished setting everything up there is an icon that the bottom that shows a Controller with an arrow pointing at the Steam logo. This will import your changes into the steam database on the local machine, and when you flip back to game mode, it will now show all of those images correctly.
While it was a lot of steps… you have not configured XCloud streaming on your steam deck.
Configuring Stadia
The steps for configuring Stadia for the most part follow the same sequence as configuring XCloud, but having done several of them you can simply start at the adding a Non-Steam game to your library step. Once again you want to find Microsoft Edge in your list and add it to your library, and then view properties on that game. In the shortcut, we want to rename this one from Edge to Stadia, and again we are going to have to change some of the launch options. The default launch should look like this:
run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=/app/bin/edge --file-forwarding com.microsoft.Edge @@u @@
Once again we are appending a chunk of text to the end of those launch parameters that will configure the window size, kiosk mode, and launch the stadia website:
Once again you want to close out any Edge windows that you have open and launch your shortcut. In theory, if everything worked as expected you should see a full-screen session of the Stadia website. You will need to log in with your google account, but once done you should have full access to stadia. Your final step would be to launch boilr again and configure the images so that it has something other than an ugly grey square when in game mode.
Configuring Epic Game Store and GOG
This process is going to be considerably easier than everything you have just gone through. It will still require you to be in Desktop Mode, however. Launch Discover again and this time type in “Heroic” which should bring up the Heroic Games Launcher. This application is an open-source installer that currently covers both Epic Games Store and GOG. It does a few other things that I will talk about later, but the first step is installing it. Click install and once finished launch the application while in Desktop Mode.
When you first open the application it will prompt you to log into your Epic Games account and your GOG account. Doing each will allow the application to access the games you have access to on your account. Once you have completed each, those games should now show up in your library as something you have the ability to download and install.
For GOG I chose to install Cyberpunk 2077, since that is ultimately where I own my copy of that game. It took forever to install and just so you are aware it goes through a process. The first bit is to download the game, then it goes through a configuring files step, then finally it installs the game and does some cleanup before the game is ready to play. Given that I was installing an over 60GB game to an SD card… this all took a very long time. Unfortunately, the Heroic Game Launcher only allows you to download a single game at a time, and things cannot be queued up.
Once finished I launched the game the first time in the Desktop Mode to make sure it was working as expected. Then I hopped into Boilr to make sure the images were correctly set. Then from that point forward I could launch the game happily in game mode. Effectively everything you do in Desktop Mode at least once in order to make sure it will run when you flip back into Game Mode. Essentially Game Mode masks a lot of processes so if something goes wrong, you won’t be able to see why.
I used Ooblets as my test case for Epic Game Store and again the same process followed. I started the download, and thankfully this one went much faster considering it is only around 800MB for the entire game. I let it finish, then launched it to test that everything worked as expected. Finally, I hopped over into Boilr to configure the images. Since then I have launched both Cyberpunk 2077 and Ooblets a few times while in game mode and everything worked flawlessly.
So in theory, if you have been following along to this point you should now have easy access to Xbox Cloud Gaming, Stadia, Epic Games Store, and Cyberpunk 2077 on your Steam Deck. Next up I think I am going to start playing around with emulation. There is something called EmuDeck that acts as a launcher for a whole slew of emulators and handles their configuration.
One last bonus benefit of the Heroic Games Launcher is it also serves as a really straightforward way to download and install a large number of Proton compatibility versions. As you follow specific guides they might recommend that you use a specific version of the proton drivers in order to get the best performance. Inside the HGS, there is a whole section labeled the “Wine Manager” that allows you to quickly install every Wine-GE, Wine-Lutris, and Proton-GE driver that you could want. So far the Steam Deck feels like the handheld I have always wanted, that I can basically configure to do anything that I could ever want to do with it.
