The biggest surprise is fallout 76. I thought it was universally disliked? Is it the fallout TV show causing it?

I've noticed that the games that dominate this list every month are very long games designed to suck players into their gameplay loops for hundreds of hours. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes me wonder if there are short games that are very popular, yet get left off of this list just because they end in 10 hours. I would like to see a top 20 list sorted by number of players rather than playtime.

Surprised to see The Witcher 3 still on that list. And the fact that Stardew Valley is number one also is surprising to me.

It would have been interesting to see the actual total hours for each game as well.

Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Hades and Isaac are surprising. They're both old enough that I would have thought they wouldn't be flush with players right now. The fallout stuff makes sense, given its fanbase and the show's influence. I wonder if I should go back and try to 100% either of them now...

Balatro made me have a 7/4 rhythm playing in my head 24/7

This is only because they exclude me as an outlier putting in ten thousand hours of Project Zomboid on the Deck.

Balatro is a legal drugs.

Helldivers 2 on higher difficulties has me hitting 15fps sometimes. It's so damn tough to play on steam deck because of the quality, but it's honestly amazing it runs half decent at all.

This list is badly missing Rimworld.

Hmm that's weird, emulation station is missing :)

I've been gaming fairly strictly on deck for everything, even if I have to trial and error a custom control scheme. That said, I'm switching to desktop for bg3. I keep missing details that actually have visual cues I didn't know about until someone actually pointed them out to me.

I’m surprised by Helldivers. I can’t imagine that it runs very well.

Definitely gonna have to install NV on my deck that finally arrived yesterday and see how good it is on deck... even though I am still nowhere near done with my melee build on my desktop and will need to copy all my bug fixing mods and settings from there as well.

Maybe I'll do an unarmed build where I side with Yes Man while taking out as many factions as possible.

Ok, what am I doing wrong that Fallout 3 isn't working? It just crashes on start.

Source?

It’s the same games for the most part.