I will say, Cyberpunk runs a lot better on the Deck than Clair Obscur does. Clair Obscur isn’t worth running on Deck IMO - frames drop below 30, hair and shadows are a horrible mess, and in the game’s first big cutscene that wasn’t an FMV it was so stuttery that it was making the music crackle. Completely ruins the game.

My steam deck is 95% docked gameplay. I love the ui, ux, cross saves, steam features, ability to play non steam games, and ease of use with the pile of controllers I’ve accreted over the years.

The same experience but it can run Expedition 33 at 1080p without looking like a framey disaster? Sign me up unless it’s ridiculously expensive. I’ve got no interest at all in buying one of the big 3’s DRM boxes, and building a PC for the living room is very expensive unless I’m willing to have it be a bigass tower. The cube is for meeeeeeee.

Well, you have to buy the game to try launching it without Steam. Or ask someone who did, of course. It’d be nice to know before buying.

Do note that the default shortcuts Steam uses are Steam dependent - they’re “steam://” addresses that tell Steam to load the game, not shortcuts to the game’s raw executable.

Steam notifies for third party DRM, but not for the games that do/don’t use Steamworks DRM. There are games on Steam that are completely DRM free and will launch from the exe file without Steam running at all, but there’s no way to tell if Game X is one of those other than word of mouth.