Honestly, I am so tired of buying a promising-looking indie or sale bargain only to discover it melts my Deck battery in an hour or needs Proton GE and a dozen launch flags to not crash. Store pages sell screenshots and specs, not the practical stuff that matters to the 2025 gamer: framerate on portable hardware, estimated battery drain, and whether Proton/cloud saves/workshop actually work out of the box.
Imagine if Steam had small, crowd-sourced badges and simple graphs on each store page: “Deck: 30-45 FPS (med) / ~2.5h battery”, “Laptop low-end: 40-60 FPS (med-high)”, plus a Proton status: OOTB / Needs GE / Broken, and a cloud-save reliability score. Make it opt-in telemetry so Valve can show realistic expectations and filter results. This would save everyone from refunds and angry threads, and make the Deck/laptop ecosystem way less hostile to new buyers.
Who else thinks we should start compiling examples to push for this? If you have games that wildly misrepresented performance or needed weird fixes, drop them here and let’s make a list Valve can’t ignore.
That wouldn’t scale well at all
There is already different Steam Deck SKUs, and there is more hardware coming which multiplies the lift. The data collected may not be helpful either. You could have too few data points for accurate representation, or too much variability between different environments and devices (battery level, brightness, any mods, custom hardware). Then you have the issue of data age. A software update (from the game itself or Steam OS) could dramatically impact performance, so you’d have to flag and filter by that too
It’s almost like they want us to spend an hour on reddit/protondb for every game we buy. My ‘research’ library is bigger than my actual game library at this point. Just tell me if it’s gonna cook my deck or not, valve. Please.
