Community Tutorial: Deploying To Steam Deck

General Tutorial & Course Discussions
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Getting your Unreal game onto your shiny, new steam deck is probably simpler than you thought! This brief tutorial walks through using the SteamOS Devkit Client to deploy to your device. Link to new Epic docs: Steam Deck Quick Start in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/qOW3/unreal-engine-deploying-to-steam-deck

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Hi - Thanks for the guide. After following these instructions here’s what I experienced.

When uploading title from DevKit I received an ERROR: start command is empty / missing!:
Untitled-2
I resolved this issue by adding the .exe name in the start command before uploading. Mine was “SteamTest.exe”

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Untitled-31918Ă—657 136 KB

Now I am able to deploy and see the game on my SteamDeck under the Non-Steam game tab. However the game will not launch. I’ve tried selecting every version of proton to no avail.

  • Proton Experimental launches the game but the steam loader runs infinitely.

  • Proton 7.0-5 launched the game and prompted me The following components are required to run this program: C++ Visual Studio Code. I went through the install and the game launches to black then closes.

  • All other protons simply do not start the game.

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Tello

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have you fix this?

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Do you managed to get native linux build work ? I get crash report client when i press play button. (error is something releated to vulkan)

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If you use proton 7.x, not 8.x, you can flag in the options / compatibility menu the
“force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool” (In proton 8
After intsalling C++ Visual Studio Code, the game was run for me without any problems.

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Nice article, thanks very much! I have a question that I’d like to have confirmed.

Can I use a regular Steam Deck to deploy my developed games to? Or do you need some kind of Steam Deck Dev Kit hardware?

Update: Never mind my question, I got a Steam Deck and it works perfectly for deploying developed games.

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Thank you! This worked for me too.

We’re currently on Proton 8, but going back to Proton 7 worked.

For the “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool”, you can find that option in the settings of your game in the Steam UI (gear icon > “Properties” > “Compatibility”). Setting the compatibility tool to Proton 8 will prompt you to install the C++ VSC on the deck, and after installing it, the game runs for me.

@Swelllog’s exe fix was also necessary.