Elden Ring, Witcher 3, and Hades are some of Steam Deck's most-played games

Steam Deck
(Image credit: Valve)

Valve has revealed the ten games that Steam Deck players have spent the most time with over the past month, giving us a pretty good insight into what people are actually playing on the handheld.

The list is unordered, so we don't know how each game ranks against the others, but this top ten list represents the games with the most user playtime on Steam Deck over the past month. (For context, the first wave of Decks started shipping in late February, so we're still talking about relatively early adopters here.)

Given the popularity of the game, it's no surprise to see Elden Ring on the list, especially since Valve has given some special attention to fixing the game's PC performance issues on Deck. While the platform's specs might be a bit lower than that of your desktop gaming PC, it seems people aren't shying away from massive open worlds, as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and No Man's Sky also make the list.

Beyond that, there are a lot of roguelikes. There's the recent megahit, Vampire Survivors, but plenty of others new and old, too, including Hades, Rogue Legacy 2, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, and Slay the Spire. Run-based games are a great fit for a handheld, and plenty of Deck owners seem to agree.

Aperture Desk Job also makes the top ten, so it looks like Valve's introduction to Steam Deck's features has proven popular. You don't have to play Aperture Desk Job on a Deck, but the free game basically runs through the handheld's control options with a brief comedy adventure through the Portal and Half-Life universe.

Here's the full list. Again, this is not ranked.

  • Aperture Desk Job
  • The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
  • Elden Ring
  • Hades
  • No Man's Sky
  • Rogue Legacy 2
  • Slay the Spire
  • Stardew Valley
  • Vampire Survivors
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

This list comes as a footnote in Valve's monthly rundown of new features added to the Steam Deck. All ten of these games are marked as 'Verified' for the Deck, but that wasn't always the case. Valve says "four of these ten titles used to be either Unsupported or Playable, and still would be without devs doing the work to improve the experience for Deck customers. While we're highlighting these titles here, this same work is happening all over the giant Steam back-catalog."

Check out our Steam Deck review if you're on the fence about Valve's handheld.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.