My dad has been playing it, and almost exclusively it, for years. From 360 to Xbox One to Xbox Series X. It’s literally the only game he even has for the X, he bought the machine just to play Skyrim. He was so excited to find mods. Idk how many thousands of hours he has in it.
Say what you will about Bethesda and Skyrim, but they must have done something right because people still can't put it down over a decade later. I do want to play it at some point, but I don't know when I'll have that kind of time.
To be fair, it was a really fun game. They did a great job with it. In fact, I've been itching to play it again.
Linked is an image of text. It's bullet points, but I assume it is ordered? Text content is:
Top 20 Steam Deck games of August 2023, by hours played
Baldur's Gate 3
ELDEN RING
DAVE THE DIVER
Stardew Valley
Vampire Survivors
Grand Theft Auto V
Red Dead Redemption 2
Brotato
Fallout 4
Cyberpunk 2077
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
ARMORED CORE™ VI FIRES OF RUBICON™
Hogwarts Legacy
Slay the Spire
Hades
HoloCure - Save the Fans!
Remnant II
Halls of Torment
At the bottom it does say “…by hours played” indicating it’s in ranked order.
"top 20 by hours played" doesn't specify order though, does it? Sure, it's expected. But not explicit. I guess you expect "20 most played games" otherwise?
thank you. no way im going on twitter even for a second.
Thankfully OP linked to an imgur screenshot - I didn't have to visit the Twitter source.
I just love that binding of Isaac is still doing so well
The fact that you can play it with all the infinite goodness from the Workshop is a really strong selling point because it's thus the only mobile version of Isaac that is actually up to date + modded compared to mobile/console versions.
900 FRUSTRATING hours of my life that I'm never gonna get back
1300 hours of fun and 300 hours of Repentance
Halls of Torment
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one!
glad to see it sneaking up on the list here, looking forward to updates
I’m surprised too! Feels like this game came out of nowhere and still has lots of room to grow, good for the devs.
I stopped playing after the second stages final boss took no damage. I spent 20 minutes on him and got him 1/4th of the way dead maybe. Ended up just quitting the run.
My answer to problems in Halls of Torment is to use archer crit build. If that doesn't work, add more crit.
There's my 80+ hours of Stardew Valley in the past week lol
Making a difference!!!
80 hours in a week?
Stardew is a full time job
Company I worked for committed seppuku, figured I'd find a way to relax
shoutout to all the brotato mains
I really gotta fuckin buy that
Old is gold
Amazed to see Holocure on there, pretty good going for a fan project
seeing fallout 4 and skyrim still doing so well brings a smile to my face, at the time i genuinely bought a ps4 so i could play them
Same with The Witcher
Damn people are able to play baldurs gate on there? I tried and everything becomes so blurry that it’s not even worth. Wonder if I’m doing something wrong
Set resolution to 900p, turn all settings to low or off (especially Antialiasing and god rays) except for textures at medium and the AMD upscaling to ultra high quality. Enable slow HDD mode if you installed the game to an SD card. Increase text size.
Runs very smooth for me.
Setting to low isn't necessary. Runs great on Medium.
Turn off FSR. I've got 30 hours into it and prefer it on deck over PC.
Try turning off FSR in the graphics settings, it looks much better and clearer with it off.
Second this! FSR makes everything blurry in BG3
I don't have it on me but there's an article with recommended settings and it runs pretty well
Launcher option: DirectX 11
Model quality: Low
Texture filtering: Trilinear
Shadow quality: Low
Fog quality: Low
Ambient occlusion: Off
Everything else: Ultra preset equivalents
Maxing out AA was a big help for me, with there being some weirdness due to the option resetting to off on game restart. I'm not sure I'd that's been fixed in the latest patch.
Apologies - I think the Witcher was mostly me. I finally decided I was going to finish it so I could move on to something new.
I've been playing it since it launched, I'll replay it until Geralt isn't cool anymore.
I've been happily adding to Dave the Diver's numbers, such a perfect fit! Pretty interesting list all around, definitely some surprises in there.
It is amazing how every time you think "surely by now, I must have seen most of what Dave has to offer" it fires off another bonkers event.
Yup, never ceases to amaze me! If with no context you'd described to me everything the game throws at you, I'd straight up think it'd never work but, amazingly, it all somehow fits together nicely. Hell, the base roguelite + management sim premise is wild enough on its own lol.
Very much looking forward to whatever they come up with next!
Not sure what it says about the current state of gaming that so many of these games are quite old
Not much? I eyeball it as about 1/4 of the games being in the last two years. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
If an actual majority were brand new games it would just tell you that PC gamers (or at least steam deck) are just chasing novelty over quality. It's OK not to play every brand new game right on release, and it's OK to play older games.
It looks like 1/4 of the games were released in the last 2 months(ish) lol:
-Baldur's Gate 3
-Dave the Diver
-Armored Core 6
-Holocure
-Remnant 2
If I'm counting it right, half of the games were released in the last 2 years
Yeah, I didn't search. Just did the ones I immediately recognized as recent big budget ones.
HoloCure is an exception I’d say: It was on itch.io for almost a year before the recent Steam release.
It's the Steam Deck. Older games are gonna run better.
Nah last few years have released some of the best games of all time. Just this year alone we got TOTK and Baulders Gate 3. Gaming is in really good shape right now.
I think it says far more about the capabilities of the steam deck. The thing is perfect for older, less intensive titles. I wouldn't expect this list to be filled with new releases.
Yeah I prefer to play more demanding games on my PC and up the graphics
Glad to see Stardew Valley in the list 😊
It's been awesome to see the success of Vampire Survivors. Such a technically simple idea that's so much fun!
Play halls of torment! Really similar vibe, with a different graphical style and gameplay loop. So much fun!!!
WTF is Dave the Diver?
Really cute and relaxing game. Lots of charm and perfect for the steam deck. In this game youre a dude named Dave, a diver, who catches fish by day and works in a sushi bar by night. I stopped playing zelda totk for this haha.
I'm wondering the same about that and about whatever the heck is called "Brotato!" Do you play as a potato? I'm intrigued
It's a vampire survivors like bullet heaven game.
Edit: I mean Brotato.
Brotato kicks ass
Fr it’s super underrated. Probably my favorite Vampire Survivors type game.
Gotta assume those BG3 Steam Deck numbers are gonna tank as people get into acts 2 and 3. Act 1 runs quite well on deck, but no amount of low settings or disabled features provides an acceptable level of performance.
I’m on act 3. The performance level is acceptable to me. 30fps/1080p (docked) on low settings.
I’m having more bugged quest or game does not want to detect your mouse right now problems than graphics or performance ones.
There are bugged quests, glitched cameras and abruptly disappointed dialogue aplenty in the back half of the game, for sure. Mind sharing your complete game settings? And are you overclocking or something? I'm genuinely astounded by the performance you're getting and would like to try to recreate.
Have you played since the 2nd patch in the last few days? From what I've heard it's a reasonable improvement but I haven't booted it up yet.
Yeah, I went back and tried it again yesterday, fully updated. I have no idea how anyone is getting 30 FPS on steam deck in act 3, unless they're in the camp or something.
Yeah we played some today and still dip below 30 in act 2, so I'm guessing the final act is still in rough shape. Still managed to feel much smoother, though, so hopefully they continue the trend.
I’m really surprised to see Baldurs Gate 3 so high, as I’ve heard it doesn’t run too well on Deck.
I’ve been playing it nonstop on my pc, but don’t want to spend time downloading it on the Deck if it doesn’t run well and devours my battery. Is it better than I’ve been hearing?
I play it pretty much exclusively on my Deck and haven’t run into any performance issues that have bothered me. Patch 2 made things noticeably smoother so I expect it to get even better over time. I haven’t hit act 3 yet though and that seems to be where most people have problems in general.
Turning off FSR is a must if you don’t want a blurry mess.
Surprises me as well. I did briefly try it out on Deck but it seemed that my options were either very blurry or very laggy graphics. But still playable I guess if Steam Deck is your only option.
I had the blurinnes only if i enabled TAA, no problems with SMAA, but it still sucks the battery dry and frame rate in act3 was not good. If combat wasnt turn based i'd would not play it on the deck.
Just posted my shock too before seeing this comment. I really don’t see how it would work, my game runs so blurry on the deck
I play it on the Deck and it runs very well for me, that was actually how I played exclusively for the first few weeks. I only ran into problems when trying to do cross-play, as saving between the two is apparently the shittiest experience ever and I just gave up on it. Now I have an exclusively PC playthrough (good-aligned) and Deck playthrough (evil-aligned). The control scheme takes some getting used to, but it’s still really good.
Cross-save seems to work better now, at least it doesn't sit there trying to sync forever for me.
Same with cyberpunk, people can play it on steam deck? I dont think i can play FPS games there at all, less alone on a small screen with 30 fps (at best)
Nah, Cyberpunk runs well. 30 to 40 in my experience, the real issue is the fucking tiny text that can be barely big enough to be readable, that red font isn't helping either. I think my time with it is split roughly in half between my desktop and Deck. You do need to try find good settings, but I mean it's a handheld so some effort is required.
Baldur's Gate I also play on either system, but I get the bit about it being blurry. I took a fair amount of time figuring out how to get rid of it, I can go grab a screenshot or two with my settings if anyone wants them. It keeps at 30 more or less reliably... but it's important to mention I'm still in act 1. The super weird part is how for some reason it's less buggy on the Deck! Very puzzling. On the desktop it seems to leak memory and that ends up in horrible stuttering, then with some bad luck it can stop accepting inputs aside from menu stuff and movement, and this one seems to be fixable by loading the save on the Deck.
Edit, screenshots:
I play it with a keyboard and mouse using my dock work fine mostly no lag otherwise too small a screen for me for that kind of game
Honestly I know the Deck can run recent and current AAA titles but I generally have had just as much fun playing low-demand games like Stardew, Dead Cells, Caveblazers, etc.
Does anyone else have Halls of Tournament regularly crash on their steam deck normally when they’ve got about five minutes or less in a run? It’s like 30-50% of the time for me.
I love the game but the crashing (and loss of progress) sucks. I need to pick up Vampire Survivors since I know it’s similar and look fun.
Try Performance Mode in HoT's settings. My first time I made it to 30 minutes, my game crashed. I turned on Performance Mode, and it's been running just fine ever since. With the retro PC game vibe they're going for, Performance Mode arguably adds to the experience!
That said, your game crashes when you're five minutes into a run? I did hear that the game can have crashing issues on Steam Deck, but that's a little extreme. Not sure if Performance Mode will fix that.
I left out an important word “left”, as in I get 25-30min into a run and it crashes. I’ll try performance mode!
I sent in logs of my crash to the devs back when it happened.
How is elden ring's performance on steam deck?
40 is better than 30, IMO. It's not rock solid, but the drops mostly happen in transition areas where you aren't in combat, and 30 has very noticeable input lag.
Medium graphic settings solid 30fps, or not that stable 40fps with sime settings turned down.
It was my mist played game on the deck befor baldurs gate 3
I probably contribute like half the hours Fallout 4 is getting, once you go through the pain of getting modding working how you want, it's so easy to sink another hundred or so hours into it.
Lil Steamie Decky is hauling ass with 200 plugins just fine (assuming you don't mind cranking everything to low settings, but you won't notice it much on that display)
I'm impressed that Cyberpunk is in the top 10 considering how much flack that game caught.
People spent 8 years molding their personality around that game. Even when it tried to kill people it couldn't kill the hype.
I've been toying with the idea of getting one of these but I like strategy games like HOI4, factorio, rimworld. Anyone have any experience with them on the Deck?
Yeah I pretty much completed factorio on the steamdeck, with some pc play over cloud sync. Had a really good experience. The right touchpad is just a mouse, and you can bind any button to any key! (Including shift etc, so you can have endless combinations!)
I started off using one of the most popular steamdeck community layouts, and then customised it to make my own (drekly's layout should be on there somewhere!)
Furthermore, I logged in recently to see there are new controller settings, so I think they may have patched the switch style controller options over to the pc version, with specific steamdeck controls. I'm so far in I've stuck with my mouse+kB layout though!
TIL factorio is on the switch
They all work great! Favtorio is the hardest one to wrap your head around but controller support is very good if you want it.
I even play a ton of Dwarf Fortress on it all the time with zero control issues.
I played a ton of EU4 and it did just fine, didn't hit 60fps but really don't need that kind of performance on a map game. back buttons for hotkeys/zooming in/out. Left trackpad set up as a touch to swap between different map types. Can always dock to a monitor with mouse/keyboard or just pair a bluetooth mouse. :)
Thanks for the insight!
This reminds me of the gabe newell ai video with the steam deck
mr_MADAFAKA@lemmy.fmhy.net to 
Fucking skyrim never dies!
My dad has been playing it, and almost exclusively it, for years. From 360 to Xbox One to Xbox Series X. It’s literally the only game he even has for the X, he bought the machine just to play Skyrim. He was so excited to find mods. Idk how many thousands of hours he has in it.
Say what you will about Bethesda and Skyrim, but they must have done something right because people still can't put it down over a decade later. I do want to play it at some point, but I don't know when I'll have that kind of time.
To be fair, it was a really fun game. They did a great job with it. In fact, I've been itching to play it again.
Linked is an image of text. It's bullet points, but I assume it is ordered? Text content is:
Top 20 Steam Deck games of August 2023, by hours played
At the bottom it does say “…by hours played” indicating it’s in ranked order.
"top 20 by hours played" doesn't specify order though, does it? Sure, it's expected. But not explicit. I guess you expect "20 most played games" otherwise?
thank you. no way im going on twitter even for a second.
Thankfully OP linked to an imgur screenshot - I didn't have to visit the Twitter source.
I just love that binding of Isaac is still doing so well
The fact that you can play it with all the infinite goodness from the Workshop is a really strong selling point because it's thus the only mobile version of Isaac that is actually up to date + modded compared to mobile/console versions.
900 FRUSTRATING hours of my life that I'm never gonna get back
1300 hours of fun and 300 hours of Repentance
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one!
glad to see it sneaking up on the list here, looking forward to updates
I’m surprised too! Feels like this game came out of nowhere and still has lots of room to grow, good for the devs.
I stopped playing after the second stages final boss took no damage. I spent 20 minutes on him and got him 1/4th of the way dead maybe. Ended up just quitting the run.
My answer to problems in Halls of Torment is to use archer crit build. If that doesn't work, add more crit.
There's my 80+ hours of Stardew Valley in the past week lol
Making a difference!!!
80 hours in a week?
Stardew is a full time job
Company I worked for committed seppuku, figured I'd find a way to relax
shoutout to all the brotato mains
I really gotta fuckin buy that
Old is gold
Amazed to see Holocure on there, pretty good going for a fan project
seeing fallout 4 and skyrim still doing so well brings a smile to my face, at the time i genuinely bought a ps4 so i could play them
Same with The Witcher
Damn people are able to play baldurs gate on there? I tried and everything becomes so blurry that it’s not even worth. Wonder if I’m doing something wrong
Set resolution to 900p, turn all settings to low or off (especially Antialiasing and god rays) except for textures at medium and the AMD upscaling to ultra high quality. Enable slow HDD mode if you installed the game to an SD card. Increase text size.
Runs very smooth for me.
Setting to low isn't necessary. Runs great on Medium.
Turn off FSR. I've got 30 hours into it and prefer it on deck over PC.
Try turning off FSR in the graphics settings, it looks much better and clearer with it off.
Second this! FSR makes everything blurry in BG3
I don't have it on me but there's an article with recommended settings and it runs pretty well
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/baldurs-gate-3-system-requirements-pc-performance-and-best-settings-to-use
Maxing out AA was a big help for me, with there being some weirdness due to the option resetting to off on game restart. I'm not sure I'd that's been fixed in the latest patch.
Apologies - I think the Witcher was mostly me. I finally decided I was going to finish it so I could move on to something new.
I've been playing it since it launched, I'll replay it until Geralt isn't cool anymore.
I've been happily adding to Dave the Diver's numbers, such a perfect fit! Pretty interesting list all around, definitely some surprises in there.
It is amazing how every time you think "surely by now, I must have seen most of what Dave has to offer" it fires off another bonkers event.
Yup, never ceases to amaze me! If with no context you'd described to me everything the game throws at you, I'd straight up think it'd never work but, amazingly, it all somehow fits together nicely. Hell, the base roguelite + management sim premise is wild enough on its own lol.
Very much looking forward to whatever they come up with next!
Not sure what it says about the current state of gaming that so many of these games are quite old
Not much? I eyeball it as about 1/4 of the games being in the last two years. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
If an actual majority were brand new games it would just tell you that PC gamers (or at least steam deck) are just chasing novelty over quality. It's OK not to play every brand new game right on release, and it's OK to play older games.
It looks like 1/4 of the games were released in the last 2 months(ish) lol:
-Baldur's Gate 3
-Dave the Diver
-Armored Core 6
-Holocure
-Remnant 2
If I'm counting it right, half of the games were released in the last 2 years
Yeah, I didn't search. Just did the ones I immediately recognized as recent big budget ones.
HoloCure is an exception I’d say: It was on itch.io for almost a year before the recent Steam release.
It's the Steam Deck. Older games are gonna run better.
Nah last few years have released some of the best games of all time. Just this year alone we got TOTK and Baulders Gate 3. Gaming is in really good shape right now.
I think it says far more about the capabilities of the steam deck. The thing is perfect for older, less intensive titles. I wouldn't expect this list to be filled with new releases.
Yeah I prefer to play more demanding games on my PC and up the graphics
Glad to see Stardew Valley in the list 😊
It's been awesome to see the success of Vampire Survivors. Such a technically simple idea that's so much fun!
Play halls of torment! Really similar vibe, with a different graphical style and gameplay loop. So much fun!!!
WTF is Dave the Diver?
Really cute and relaxing game. Lots of charm and perfect for the steam deck. In this game youre a dude named Dave, a diver, who catches fish by day and works in a sushi bar by night. I stopped playing zelda totk for this haha.
I'm wondering the same about that and about whatever the heck is called "Brotato!" Do you play as a potato? I'm intrigued
It's a vampire survivors like bullet heaven game. Edit: I mean Brotato.
Brotato kicks ass
Fr it’s super underrated. Probably my favorite Vampire Survivors type game.
Gotta assume those BG3 Steam Deck numbers are gonna tank as people get into acts 2 and 3. Act 1 runs quite well on deck, but no amount of low settings or disabled features provides an acceptable level of performance.
I’m on act 3. The performance level is acceptable to me. 30fps/1080p (docked) on low settings.
I’m having more bugged quest or game does not want to detect your mouse right now problems than graphics or performance ones.
There are bugged quests, glitched cameras and abruptly disappointed dialogue aplenty in the back half of the game, for sure. Mind sharing your complete game settings? And are you overclocking or something? I'm genuinely astounded by the performance you're getting and would like to try to recreate.
Have you played since the 2nd patch in the last few days? From what I've heard it's a reasonable improvement but I haven't booted it up yet.
Yeah, I went back and tried it again yesterday, fully updated. I have no idea how anyone is getting 30 FPS on steam deck in act 3, unless they're in the camp or something.
Yeah we played some today and still dip below 30 in act 2, so I'm guessing the final act is still in rough shape. Still managed to feel much smoother, though, so hopefully they continue the trend.
I’m really surprised to see Baldurs Gate 3 so high, as I’ve heard it doesn’t run too well on Deck.
I’ve been playing it nonstop on my pc, but don’t want to spend time downloading it on the Deck if it doesn’t run well and devours my battery. Is it better than I’ve been hearing?
I play it pretty much exclusively on my Deck and haven’t run into any performance issues that have bothered me. Patch 2 made things noticeably smoother so I expect it to get even better over time. I haven’t hit act 3 yet though and that seems to be where most people have problems in general.
Turning off FSR is a must if you don’t want a blurry mess.
Surprises me as well. I did briefly try it out on Deck but it seemed that my options were either very blurry or very laggy graphics. But still playable I guess if Steam Deck is your only option.
I had the blurinnes only if i enabled TAA, no problems with SMAA, but it still sucks the battery dry and frame rate in act3 was not good. If combat wasnt turn based i'd would not play it on the deck.
Just posted my shock too before seeing this comment. I really don’t see how it would work, my game runs so blurry on the deck
I play it on the Deck and it runs very well for me, that was actually how I played exclusively for the first few weeks. I only ran into problems when trying to do cross-play, as saving between the two is apparently the shittiest experience ever and I just gave up on it. Now I have an exclusively PC playthrough (good-aligned) and Deck playthrough (evil-aligned). The control scheme takes some getting used to, but it’s still really good.
Cross-save seems to work better now, at least it doesn't sit there trying to sync forever for me.
Same with cyberpunk, people can play it on steam deck? I dont think i can play FPS games there at all, less alone on a small screen with 30 fps (at best)
Nah, Cyberpunk runs well. 30 to 40 in my experience, the real issue is the fucking tiny text that can be barely big enough to be readable, that red font isn't helping either. I think my time with it is split roughly in half between my desktop and Deck. You do need to try find good settings, but I mean it's a handheld so some effort is required.
Baldur's Gate I also play on either system, but I get the bit about it being blurry. I took a fair amount of time figuring out how to get rid of it, I can go grab a screenshot or two with my settings if anyone wants them. It keeps at 30 more or less reliably... but it's important to mention I'm still in act 1. The super weird part is how for some reason it's less buggy on the Deck! Very puzzling. On the desktop it seems to leak memory and that ends up in horrible stuttering, then with some bad luck it can stop accepting inputs aside from menu stuff and movement, and this one seems to be fixable by loading the save on the Deck.
Edit, screenshots:
I play it with a keyboard and mouse using my dock work fine mostly no lag otherwise too small a screen for me for that kind of game
Honestly I know the Deck can run recent and current AAA titles but I generally have had just as much fun playing low-demand games like Stardew, Dead Cells, Caveblazers, etc.
Does anyone else have Halls of Tournament regularly crash on their steam deck normally when they’ve got about five minutes or less in a run? It’s like 30-50% of the time for me.
I love the game but the crashing (and loss of progress) sucks. I need to pick up Vampire Survivors since I know it’s similar and look fun.
Try Performance Mode in HoT's settings. My first time I made it to 30 minutes, my game crashed. I turned on Performance Mode, and it's been running just fine ever since. With the retro PC game vibe they're going for, Performance Mode arguably adds to the experience!
That said, your game crashes when you're five minutes into a run? I did hear that the game can have crashing issues on Steam Deck, but that's a little extreme. Not sure if Performance Mode will fix that.
I left out an important word “left”, as in I get 25-30min into a run and it crashes. I’ll try performance mode!
I sent in logs of my crash to the devs back when it happened.
How is elden ring's performance on steam deck?
40 is better than 30, IMO. It's not rock solid, but the drops mostly happen in transition areas where you aren't in combat, and 30 has very noticeable input lag.
Medium graphic settings solid 30fps, or not that stable 40fps with sime settings turned down.
It was my mist played game on the deck befor baldurs gate 3
I probably contribute like half the hours Fallout 4 is getting, once you go through the pain of getting modding working how you want, it's so easy to sink another hundred or so hours into it.
Lil Steamie Decky is hauling ass with 200 plugins just fine (assuming you don't mind cranking everything to low settings, but you won't notice it much on that display)
I'm impressed that Cyberpunk is in the top 10 considering how much flack that game caught.
People spent 8 years molding their personality around that game. Even when it tried to kill people it couldn't kill the hype.
I've been toying with the idea of getting one of these but I like strategy games like HOI4, factorio, rimworld. Anyone have any experience with them on the Deck?
Yeah I pretty much completed factorio on the steamdeck, with some pc play over cloud sync. Had a really good experience. The right touchpad is just a mouse, and you can bind any button to any key! (Including shift etc, so you can have endless combinations!)
I started off using one of the most popular steamdeck community layouts, and then customised it to make my own (drekly's layout should be on there somewhere!)
Furthermore, I logged in recently to see there are new controller settings, so I think they may have patched the switch style controller options over to the pc version, with specific steamdeck controls. I'm so far in I've stuck with my mouse+kB layout though!
TIL factorio is on the switch
They all work great! Favtorio is the hardest one to wrap your head around but controller support is very good if you want it.
I even play a ton of Dwarf Fortress on it all the time with zero control issues.
I played a ton of EU4 and it did just fine, didn't hit 60fps but really don't need that kind of performance on a map game. back buttons for hotkeys/zooming in/out. Left trackpad set up as a touch to swap between different map types. Can always dock to a monitor with mouse/keyboard or just pair a bluetooth mouse. :)
Thanks for the insight!
This reminds me of the gabe newell ai video with the steam deck
All these games suck
Comment of the year, everyone