Hey all, I’m curious what are the pros and cons (your thoughts or knowledge) of buying/installing a game via Steam or 3rd party launcher like Battle Net, Rockstar etc.
We can avoid the easy and usual suspect like “it’s easier using Steam” and just agree that these days, it’s relatively easy to get 3rd party launchers working on SD.
I’m more curious about things like performance or battery etc. Installing through Steam, we get the benefits of shader cache, but how much of a performance hit will that be, vs. installing the game via 3rd party launcher and letting the shader cache build up as we go?
For instance, is it worth the extra couple of dollars to get RDR2 on Steam or save and get it via Rockstar? Should we get Diablo IV on steam, or take advantage of the battle.net sale?
Looking forward to reading your thoughts on the matter
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Here you go brother, let me know how it goes https://github.com/moraroy/NonSteamLaunchers-On-Steam-Deck I just updated last night as well
We can avoid the easy and usual suspect like “it’s easier using Steam” and just agree that these days, it’s relatively easy to get 3rd party launchers working on SD.
We can, but I don’t think we should. Heroic and Lutris usually work, but when they don’t, it’s usually a lot harder to troubleshoot. The nonsteamlaunchers script usually works too, but I’ve seen way too many complaints about issues with it here to recommend it without reservation and certainly way too many to say it makes it as easy as just buying the game on steam. And putting everything under the sun into one single proton prefix when proton prefixes have total size limits isn’t a design decision I particularly agree with. I’m sure it works fine if you only have a small game collection, but a big one?
Ultimately, Steam remains the best place to get games on this device just based on the ease of installation alone, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that someone - who might be coming in from a non-technical “download and play” console background will automatically find it easy to troubleshoot the various non-steam options if something goes wrong.