How to Fish on Steam Deck: Verified and ProtonDB platinum
Contents
How to Fish is sold for Windows only — no macOS, no Linux on the Steam page. Despite that it runs on Steam Deck, and Valve has officially marked it at the top compatibility level.
What Valve official report says
Steam keeps a separate machine-readable compatibility report for every game. For How to Fish it returns category 3, the top of the scale.
Rather than guess what the number means, we ran the same query against seven games whose public status is known:
| Game | Category | Public status |
|---|---|---|
| Portal 2 | 3 | Verified |
| Hades | 3 | Verified |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | 3 | Verified |
| Elden Ring | 3 | Verified |
| Destiny 2 | 1 | Unsupported |
| Half-Life: Alyx | 1 | Unsupported |
| GTA V | 1 | Unsupported |
So 3 = Verified. How to Fish sits in exactly that category.
The four things Valve checked
The report lists four green items, and all four cover what usually breaks on a Deck:
- the default gamepad layout is fully functional — nothing has to be remapped by hand;
- button glyphs match the Deck controller — the game shows the prompts that are actually on the device;
- interface text is legible on the 7-inch screen;
- the default configuration performs acceptably.
That last item is not a promise of a specific frame rate. It only means Valve found no collapse at stock settings.
ProtonDB: platinum from 22 reports
ProtonDB collects reports from players themselves. As of 31 August 2026 it holds 22 reports, and the summary tier is platinum, the highest one they have. It is also the best individual tier reported, and the trending tier for recent reports. Confidence is listed as good.
Platinum on ProtonDB means the game runs under Proton with no manual tweaking at all, just like on Windows.
Why this is not surprising
The minimum requirements are very low: a Core i5-5257U or Ryzen 3 1200 class CPU, 8 GB of RAM, a GTX 1050 or RX 460 class GPU, and just 1 GB of storage. The Steam Deck is above that bar on hardware, and one gigabyte of disk is a non-issue even on the base 64 GB model.
On top of that the game has full controller support — the Steam page says Full controller support, not partial. For a handheld that matters.
What we do not know
We did not measure frame rates. Valve report leaves the target frame rate field empty, and we did not run the game on a Deck. Any specific number here would be invented.
We are also staying quiet about SteamOS in the broader sense. The same report has a separate SteamOS field holding the value 2, but we could not establish what it means: all seven control games, the Verified four included, carry the same number there. Interpreting it blind would be guesswork.
Battery life was not tested. It depends on brightness, frame cap and Deck model, and none of our sources measures it.
Frequently asked questions
Does How to Fish work on Steam Deck?
Yes. Valve official compatibility report returns the top category for it — the same one Portal 2, Hades, Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring get.
Is there a native Linux build?
No. The Steam page lists Windows only. On Deck the game runs through the Proton layer, not natively.
What does ProtonDB say?
Platinum, the highest tier. That is the average of 22 player reports, with confidence listed as good.
Do I need to configure anything by hand?
Per Valve report, no: the default gamepad layout works fully, button glyphs match the Deck, interface text is legible, and the default graphics configuration performs acceptably.
How many frames does the Deck hit?
Not established. Valve report leaves the target frame rate field empty, and we did not run the game on a Deck ourselves.