Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming
How big is the handheld PC gaming industry?
Not most users, not even as Valve intended (on the Deck, at least).
They literally reserved the green "Verified" badge for games with full controller support and are the only ones eligible for the "Great on Deck" tab. Mouse and Keyboard games get the yellow "Playable" tag instead and a warning on boot.
See, that's the sad part about actually looking things up. It takes time, people get to nitpick it to death and then some guys will just... you know, say stuff.
Lmao "Playable" tag...
It means official full controller support with the default config. There are few games that provide official controller support over Steam Input in the first place, even fewer that have any touchpad custom inputs by default and I'm not even sure if there are any that are Steam Verified. At a glance it's... what, just Rimworld again? Maybe some first party stuff left over from the Steam Machines fiasco? Sims is only Playable. Civ VII, which you called out earlier, I suspect incorrectly, has official all-stick support, what with having launched on consoles day and date. I haven't checked it because I haven't bought it yet, so if I'm wrong let me know. Civ VI doesn't have default controller support, but it's only Playable as well. In fact, if you have a list of verified games with touchpad default support I'd love to see it. I'm genuinely curious.
Look, you get to live in this very specific alternate reality where the only difference is people love dual touchpads as a main input system. That's fine, you're not hurting anybody. I get hung up on it because blatant misrepresentations on social media are fairly upsetting these days and because I'm still not over having had to use the dumb touchpads on the Vive for a couple of years back there.
But man, is it exhausting to watch it act as a proxy of some much more important crap in real time.
Wow this "alternate reality" seems pretty immersive:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/td9inr/how_good_are_the_touchpads/
My experience with them has been pretty great. I was able to play a mouse and keyboard game with them without issue (in my case, the games I tested this with were Planet Zoo and FrostPunk). From my experience in the past with Steam controller, it’s the same if not better.
People have been playing every type of game out there with the Steam Controller for years. The efficacy of trackpads is self-evident.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/0/4353368616863474991/
I like to use them for typically very mouse-oriented games, like RTS and point-n-click adventures. They also help make navigating the desktop mode a snap.
Trackpads are highly underrated as inputs for the simple reason that there are two
the ones on the steam controller were perfect
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/steam-deck-valve-gaming-handheld
the touchpads work great as a mouse replacement in games like Civilization VI, which was surprisingly playable on the Steam Deck.
Gee, what kind of "homework" did you even do? These were the top 3 search results for "steam deck trackpad review", skipping over a Reddit post titled " Steam Deck Trackpads are Actually Good" which was the #2 search result
Hah. Man, you were fuming about that one for a while, huh?
I said at the very tippy top of this thread that
I know some people swear by them, I just don't think they're worth the space they take up as a pointer device
and later
People who like these do tend to be loud and proud about it, so they stand out more
It's no surprise that there are people swearing by them loudly and proudly. In fact, there are more people doing that than the opposite, because most people just... you know, ignore the whole thing altogether and haven't through about the Steam Controller in a decade.
The reason I was pulling quotes for you is that you denied the touchpad reception in the OG Controller was mixed and that Valve was presenting them as a stick substitute, which was demonstrably incorrect.
What was I "fuming" about...? Wdym?
"Everyone around me says they have positive experiences with the touchpads! They're the ones that are wrong and I am right, because... the real people just ignore them and don't post about it!!!"
Lmao. Yeah, I'm the one in an alternate reality here...
Not everybody around me. Nobody around me has ever mentioned a touchpad outside of threads about the touchpad. It's not a thing.
Everybody on Steam seems to be playing controller games on sticks, though. At least from the data Steam shares. Which matches reviews at the time (and later, when people had to pay attention to them on the Deck), the way games on Deck are put together by devs, the low sales of the Controller, the changes to the Vive controller, the lack of other hardware manufacturers doing dual touchpads and pretty much every other piece of info at scale we have beyond anecdote.
Man, online chatter sucks and does bad things to people. I think I'm done with this. Have fun with the dual pads Valve bestowed upon you. I don't need you to change your mind about their popularity, but man, there's going to be a Smithers moment for you at some point on something else and it sure would be good if you thought back to this.
Ta.