There are many games available for Steam Deck. Valve has tested over 13,000 by the end of 2023. Many work well and some have been re-worked to be better on Steam Deck. I look at the most-played games from Steam's own records and I might have played one of those. I don't leap for every US$59.99 game out there. In fact, I may never have paid that much for a game.
Here are my favourite games on my Steam Deck, in no certain order:
Asphalt 9
Ghostwire: Tokyo
Hi-Fi Rush
Spyro: Reignited Trilogy
Road 96
A Space for the Unbound
Heaven's Vault
Ni No Kuni Remastered
and just this week, Hogwarts Legacy
Supposedly, I have 81 games that are "Great on Deck" but I have installed 47 games on it, with a 1 TB microSD card, as well as internal storage. I'd really like to get one of those 1 TB m.2 2230 cards but I'm not spending more money just yet. Equally, I'm not interested in the OLED version of Steam Deck right now. This one is about one year old.
I was surprised at the performance of Hogwarts Legacy. So far, it's fine. However, most games are fine for me. I'm not a person who looks at the performance overlay to gauge whether I'm having fun or not. Let the people with a website do that.
If you just got a Steam Deck for Christmas, I hope you enjoy it. Don't expect everything to be as it was. Change with the machine.
Update 2023.12.28: I've seen that Hi-Fi Rush and Hogwarts Legacy got some love. Even Ghostwire: Tokyo, from Tango Gameworks like Hi-Fi Rush, got a mention here or there and A Space for the Unbound did, as well. I wanted to try Baldur's Gate 3 but it's too expensive and too big. I appreciate that it works on Macs but they changed their requirements several times and it's more-or-less just available for the most powerful machines. I had hoped for Divinity - Original Sin requirements, another of Larian's games that runs on Macs.
Update 2024.07.05: I'm seriously upset that a few weeks ago, with the acquisition of Bethesda Studios, the people in charge of Xbox put an end to Tango Gameworks, which produced Hi-Fi Rush and Ghostwire: Tokyo. There were a lot of other small development houses extinguished but for someone to win awards and then to be dissolved doesn't make sense. They were in the business of fun, not loot boxes, and that's probably the reason for the decision. The person in charge of Xbox is also gone.
Update 2024.10.24: SteamOS has been updated to version 3.6.
