Valve has released a list of the top 100 most played games on the Steam Deck between March 2023 and March 2024.

The list is ordered by daily active players and, not surprisingly, covers most of the most popular games on PC over the past year or so: "Baldur's Gate 3" tops the list, followed by "Vampire Survivors," "Dave the Diver," Hogwarts Legacy, and Elden Ring.

The most played games on the Steam Deck are:

This list reveals several interesting things. The most obvious is the preponderance of single-player games: "Palworld" in 6th place bucks this trend, but the rest of the games with popular multiplayer modes, such as "GTA5," "RDR2" and "Stardew Valley With the exception of a few games, the top 20 are dominated by single-player games. With all due respect to Pocket Pair boss Takuro Mizobe, one could argue that multiplayer support is not essential to a game's success.

Secondly, and I'm not a mobile gamer, but this surprises me a bit: people don't seem to mind playing big games on small screens, like Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac, Balatro, Terraria games are a natural fit for mobile devices.

But what about Elden Ring. Cyberpunk 2077? Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Monster Hunter: World, and Fallout 4 are big, lumpy games that make you sit up front and start playing and then, oops, it's 2 am. Overall popularity notwithstanding, it seems unlikely that there would be much demand for a system designed primarily for portability, but they clearly missed the mark on that point.

By the same token, the fact that Steam Deck can't handle them at all also speaks very highly of Steam Deck; there are games like "Palworld," "GTA5," and "RDR2" that have not been tested on Steam Deck. Palworld," for example, requires some effort to play on Deck:

It's a good thing that Steam Deck is so capable: Valve said in September 2023 that Steam Deck 2, whatever it eventually becomes, will take at least two years. Given Valve's time frame, that means we'll be lucky to see a new Steam handheld device before 2030.

In December 2023, Valve released a similar list of the most played games on the Steam Deck as part of its year-end roundup: at the end of 2023, "Armored Core 6," "Starfield," and "Resident Evil 4" were the top "platinum" category, out of the top 10 in this year's ranking, and "Half-Life" is completely out of the top 100. (17]

If you have a Steam deck and are looking for new games, most of the games on this list have been marked down as part of the "2024 Steam Spring Sale," which is going on now and runs through March 21.