New Jackbox games launcher is bricking the Steam Deck but there’s a fix

The new Jackbox Megapicker launcher is reportedly bricking Steam Decks, but luckily a new hotfix has come to keep the party going.

Jackbox Games’ Megapicker game launcher is designed to gather all your favorite party games together in one place. However, the brand-new launcher has been spotted bricking the Steam Deck instead.

The same day Jackbox released the new launcher, a post was made by Reddit user thejudge555. Sharing with the r/SteamDeck community, they outlined that it had momentarily bricked their Valve handheld.

After returning to the game selection menu of the launcher, an error message appeared, which prompted the UI-related buttons to stop working entirely. Despite restarting the Steam Deck, thejude555 explained that it wouldn’t boot past the start-up logo.

They weren’t the only one. The comments on the original post were alight with multiple Steam Deck owners sharing the same frustration, recommending avoiding installing the Jackbox Megapicker entirely.

Fellow r/Steam Deck user StormcastPrime2 stated that the exact same thing happened to their handheld.

They were able to fix it by reinstalling SteamOS through a USB stick, however, it bricked once again after trying to play Megapicker for a second time.

Valve comes to the rescue with a hotfix

To their credit, Jackbox Games were quick to reply to the Reddit thread. The company’s community manager stated they were “looking into this issue.”

The developer took the game’s forums to alert players to avoid downloading the launcher for now.

In the meantime, Valve coder and Steam Deck aficionado, Pierre-Loud Griffais, took to X/Twitter to explain that a hotfix has been issued for the game launcher.

A hotfix has been issued to select Proton by default for the Jackbox Megapicker until the issues with corrupting the Steam installation are addressed. To avoid issues, don't override the compatibility selection to the Linux Runtime.

— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) July 31, 2024

This new hotfix forces the Jackbox Games Megapicker to use the default Proton layer – despite it being native on Linux.

With the native Linux version seemingly being to blame, the hotfix will launch the working Windows version of Megapicker instead.

Hopefully, it won’t be long until you can have some assurance and have all your Jackbox Games in one place on Steam Deck.