Football games on Steam Deck?

tom@feddit.nl to Steam Deck@sopuli.xyz – 15 points –

I'm keen to play a football game, e.g. FIFA.

FIFA 23 uses EA Play and thus doesn't work on Steam Deck (?). Older copies of FIFA are not sold anymore.

Does anyone play football games on Steam Deck that they could recommend?

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The Steam Deck is supposedly an emulation powerhouse from what I've heard. Could be a good option if you don't mind playing older FIFA titles from the PS1 era or similar.

Emulation of PS2 has been flawless. The setup is easy and you can get good looking graphics (I’m playing ratchet and clank series right now. 1080p makes the models look really nice. )

PS3 has been near impossible for me to get running on my SteamDeck. Others have said they got it working with titles being hit or miss.

undefined> PS3 has been near impossible for me to get running on my SteamDeck. Others have said they got it working with titles being hit or miss.

Most of PS3 games are encrypted and before trying to run those games with RPCS3 you need to gather decryption key and decrypt them. There are several tools for that. Last time i was doing it I used https://pypi.org/project/libray/ and it worked flawlessly. It automatically downloads keys for most games

Also don't expect every game to run flawlessly. Many bigger titles are still unplayable.

I don't have the Deck, so I kept my answer conservative. Glad to hear PS2 also works well. Might be more worth it for the OP.

Or the ps3 era, if the deck is able to run skate 3 with rpcs3, then surely any of the ps3 fifa games will run alright.

Ps3 emulation is very hit or miss. I’ve yet to find a game that runs well. Maybe after a few more RPCS3 updates.

eSoccer 2023, formerly known as Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) has worked on the Steam Deck in the past. I have read about issues with updates.

Thanks for the suggestion, eSoccer looks good!

Getting other launchers to run can be tough so that’s probably why you’d think it won’t work. But to me it’s not worth the effort.

I’d go with emulating. Any PS2 FIFA game will work great. I’ve gotten WiiU roms to run well. People have gotten Switch games to work (I tried BotE but I need to organize the game files on a separate computer first and see if I can get it to work.) PS3 was a hassle to setup and won’t even work after hours of setup. Ymmv.

There are some indie games on steam you can try as well but they are more arcady.

If EA Play is the only barrier to playing these games, you can definitely get them installed and try them out with Proton.

Unfortunately FIFA 23's DRM prevents it from working on the Deck, FIFA 22 does work though with EA Play

There is always cracked versions, check out fitgirl for older FIFA versions, -19.

The newer games use denovo which is unlikely to work on Linux but with it removed it should run fine.

FIFA is a soccer game, not football. You're thinking of Madden.

Soccer is called soccer in the United States. The rest of the world calls it football. I don't understand why American football is called football when the only time a player's foot touches the ball is during a punt or field goal.

Football is literally what 195/196 or so countries call soccer dude.