HANDHELD NEWS – And there is another title so popular that it has spent years in the top five on Gabe Newell’s aging handheld PC.
We probably would have guessed that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the most popular games on Steam Deck, but according to Valve, it really should not be. The 2011 RPG continues to show up on the company’s most-played Steam Deck charts for December, January, February, March, and now April, despite being marked as “Unsupported” on the platform. It appears that the 2016 version, now the default one, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, was first pushed into the “Unsupported” category last December. Usually, that white unsupported symbol is essentially a death sentence for handheld play, because Valve uses it when part or all of a game is not currently working on Steam Deck.
Sometimes an unsupported game can still be forced into working shape with heavy tweaking or by messing around with .ini files, as happens with the original Max Payne, but those kinds of games often do not properly support a gamepad anyway, and usually the effort is not worth it. Yet thousands of people are still playing Skyrim on Steam Deck, and it is hard to blame them because the game reportedly runs just fine. No real explanation was given for why it was moved from “Verified” to “Unsupported,” while Steam Deck communities, along with users on Reddit and Steam, continue to say that everything is still functioning as it should.
Then there is Baldur’s Gate 3, which has been almost impossible to shake off the top charts since launch. It has now been 33 months since the game came out, and during that period it dropped out of the platform’s top five most-played games only four times. Even then, Larian’s masterpiece never fell out of the top ten. Valve keeps a public chart of the most-played Steam Deck titles, sortable by week, month, and year, and those numbers tell a lot of stories, but perhaps the most striking is just how stubbornly Baldur’s Gate 3 has remained near the top.
It held first place for six months after launch, a record that only Balatro later beat with seven months, at least going back to August 2023. In second place sits Stardew Valley, which managed four non-consecutive months in the top spot. Baldur’s Gate 3 stayed in the top five for exactly two years after launch and only slipped to sixth place for the first time last August. Its lowest point came in October, when it dropped to eighth, but since then it has bounced back, and throughout this year it has stayed inside the top five again, averaging roughly fourth place since 2024.
Baldur’s Gate 3 clearly tries to squeeze every last ounce out of the handheld’s modest APU while also chewing through the battery. At launch, it ran at roughly 20-30 FPS on Steam Deck. Still, it controls well with a gamepad, and because it is turn-based, the weak frame rate does not hurt the experience nearly as much as it would in a faster action game. We also have not yet seen the full effect of the native Linux port.
The game’s sheer staying power says plenty about its popularity. People evidently still feel the urge to spend time with Baldur’s Gate 3 even while they are on the move, nearly three years after release.
Source: PCGamer, PCGamer, Gaming On Linux, Valve
