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Nvidia and Valve would like Team Green’s GeForce Now streaming service to work better on the Steam Deck for those into cloud gaming on the portable (and yes, there are reasons why you’d want to – we’ll get to that ).
As PC gamer (opens in new tab) reports, this came from Andrew Fear, who is Director of Product Management for GeForce Now at Nvidia, telling our sister site that: “There is no native app on Steam Deck today. Use a Chromium browser to make it work. I would say both Nvidia and Valve, I think we’re both interested in making [GeForce Now on Steam Deck] better. But we have no announcements about a native app coming to Steam.”
As Fear points out, if you currently want to stream games through GeForce Now on the Steam Deck, you’ll need to do so in a Chromium browser (such as Chrome or Edge).
As you might guess, running in a browser isn’t the best experience for GeForce Now – it makes things very clunky, especially around the interface and game controls – and a native app would be a big step forward for the Steam Deck.
Analysis: Nvidia and Valve, the Steam stream dream team?
The problem here is that Fear’s statement is very vague. While they say both Nvidia and Valve want to make GeForce Now a better experience on the Steam Deck, there’s no suggestion how that could happen – and furthermore, the clarification that there’s no native app in the works doesn’t feel very positive. This is just a hint that things will be improved, rather than something remotely concrete.
While it’s good to see that signaled, there’s nothing to get excited about just yet. Whether there will ever be a native Linux app for GeForce Now, we’re not sure, let’s just say. It’s a minority gaming platform to say the least (1.4% of all gamers on Steam as of the last Valve hardware survey), and unless the Steam Deck (which runs Linux, SteamOS to be exact) becomes a really big thing in going forward, it’s probably not worth it in terms of development time and cost for now.
Why would you want to stream games via GeForce Now on the Steam Deck? Well, for starters, it’s a way to save battery life, since it’s much less demanding to run GeForce Now in the browser than it is to have the Steam Deck run certain games natively. Demanding titles can totally wreak havoc on the handheld’s battery, of course, while streaming GeForce Now can give you several hours of life (reportedly on the order of five hours, according to the comments we’ve seen).
It also offers the ability to play some games that are not compatible with the Steam Deck and won’t run at all. That includes games with anti-cheat features that don’t play well with the Proton compatibility layer that the Steam Deck relies on. In addition to non-functional titles, there could be other games that are glitchy or don’t run optimally on the deck, and streaming those could also be a much better experience (while saving battery).
The trade-off with streaming as always is that the smoothness of the gameplay you experience is down to the speed of your internet connection.