Baldur’s Gate 3 players on Steam Deck and SteamOS may have noticed recently it appeared like it uninstalled itself, here’s what’s going on.
Writing on Bluesky, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais simply said:
A fix has been deployed for the Baldur’s Gate 3 install issue. May have to restart Steam Deck for it to pick up the new configuration.
The game from what I understand wasn’t actually uninstalled, it just looked like it due to a change on Steam’s backend configuration. However, players may not have been able to actually get it to reinstall to pick it up either.
A little background info — currently, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs the Windows version through the Proton compatibility layer to make it playable on Linux systems like Steam Deck with SteamOS. However, it seems like the developer Larian Studios are working on a Native Linux version specifically for the Steam Deck, which you can see in the depots on SteamDB with a Native Linux version set for Steam Deck only (if a depot is set for Steam Deck it’s not available on Desktop Linux).
What happened is that Valve’s automatic Steam Deck Verification ended up picking this up, and setting the Native version as the default (SteamDB). Even though it’s not yet public and hasn’t been announced, which caused problems with players who have it currently installed. I’ve seen this issue before with Deck Verified testing and approving a Beta release for a different game, it just seems to be an issue Valve need to solve to separate somehow between public and non-public builds of games.
So Valve have now just put a separate configuration on Baldur’s Gate 3 to force it onto Proton, which is likely to be removed if / when Larian release the special Steam Deck Native Linux build if Valve’s retesting then shows it to be better to set that as the actual default.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.