I keep getting crashes in certain games, for example, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, Grim Dawn, Bioshock Remastered and a few others, where the game will either freeze up for a few seconds, or it will instantly crash, then reboot the Steam Deck with a ‘Verifying Installation’ screen. This happens randomly, so it happened multiple times earlier with Kingdoms of Amalur, it crashed three times when I loaded up the game, but then on the fourth try, I got about 30-45 minutes of play time before it happened again.

I upgraded my SSD as soon as I got the device, to a Sabrent Rocket 2230. So all games have been installed on this drive.

I have tried different versions of Proton with these games, and I have tried resetting my Steam Deck back to factory settings, but this issue still persists.

I’ve also done a re-imaging of my Steam Deck, running from a vanilla install (no add-ons or tools eg. Decky Loader, CryoUtilities), the official Steam charger plugged in, and re-installing the game (Kingdoms of Amalur), I still experienced two crash and reboots with ‘verifying installation’ within ten minutes of me booting the game up for the first time.

Is this a hardware, or software issue? And will I need to RMA the device, or is there any other fixes I could try?