The Steam Deck and other PC gaming handhelds can squeeze a shocking amount of performance out of relatively old integrated graphics hardware. But they’re still essentially tiny little laptops without dedicated GPUs. If you’re developing a 3D game on something like Unreal, it needs a bit of tuning to run well on handhelds. Now, Valve is giving developers a peek behind the curtain on Steam.
For games that are Steam Deck Verified, developers will get a readout of the last 30 days of average frame rate data collected by users who’ve opted in. “We’re providing this data because while customers overwhelmingly agree with the Verified rating for titles (>95%), it can be valuable for developers to better understand the experiences of customers who disagree, especially in the context of a specific title or update.” The view will later go out to Steam Deck Playable games (bootable but with user adjustments needed) at some point, too.
Valve
The timeline view makes sense, specifically for updates that negatively affect the performance of the Steam Deck (and positively, I suppose). Getting the average view for hundreds or thousands of players who are on nearly identical hardware is hugely beneficial. I think it might be even better if you could drill down into more hardware configurations. I’m sure a developer would like, say, an average of frame rates for users on the 8GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti card.
For that matter, regular users would probably like to have that data, too. “Will it run on Steam Deck?” is the question that the Verified system is designed to answer. But there’s a big difference between “it will run” and “it will run at 30 frames per second, occasionally shifting into 15 when you first enter a new area.” Sure, it makes sense why Steam wouldn’t get that detailed by default… but I imagine that some developers might choose to put something like “60 FPS average Steam Deck performance” on the store page, with a nice Valve-supplied chart to prove it. (And when I say “imagine,” what I mean is “please do this.” I want it.)
I have to assume that similar tools are being developed for the Steam Machine, with the further assumption that the Steam Machine will actually launch as planned later this year. With one delay already on the books due to all the insanity in the PC market right now, that’s beginning to look a lot less likely.
