Today (March 5), Valve announced that more than 1,000 games have been verified or playable on its handheld Steam Deck, and the number is still growing.
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Hello everyone!
As you can imagine, this week has been exciting for us: not just because the first Steam Decks have been shipped to customers, but because just yesterday, we reached another milestone: over 1,000 games are already in “Verified” or “Playable” on Deck. This seems like an excellent opportunity to illustrate what these numbers related to the Deck Validation Project mean for now and in the future.
Meaning
When we talk about compatibility rating numbers, we emphasize that this is only a snapshot of the situation at a certain point in time, and these ratings will change over time.
As you read this blog, partners are also working hard to add controller support, enable anti-cheat on the Deck, and make the player experience on the Deck smoother. At the same time, every day we’re fixing the Proton bug that’s causing problems in some games and adding new features to support others.
In doing so, the existing bar for a game to be “verified” or “playable” is extremely high. If a game shows the controller icon 99% of the time, but sometimes asks you to “press the F key” during gameplay, that’s “playable”, not “verified”.
If the game is 99% functional, but the in-game mini-game to access optionality crashes, or the tutorial video doesn’t render, it’s “not supported”.
But this is only temporary! This is intentional: when Deck first started shipping, we believed it was more valuable to avoid “false positives” (the game was “validated” but partially not working), even if some games showed “false negatives” (This game is “unsupported”, but I didn’t find any bugs with it).
Even by today’s standards, based on how quickly we and our partners are optimizing, we expect to see many titles go from “playable” or even “unsupported” to “verified” in the coming weeks. We also expect these standards and ideas to change as the Deck continues to ship and gets more feedback from customers and developers.
New features for developers
Additionally, we’re rolling out a new feature today that allows developers to communicate directly with customers about the compatibility of their titles on Steam Deck.
One such example is The Edge World. The game’s “playable” compatibility details include a direct link to its blog post outlining the work the developers are doing to make the game run more smoothly on Steam Deck.
Let us know what you think
We’re ecstatic that Deck is finally starting to ship because it’s only after customers actually interact with it that we can start getting actual feedback and actual data. After we’ve worked hard to build and roll out the Deck Validation project that you’re seeing now, we’re also excited to start iterating now based on how you actually interact with it.
To make this happen, please go ahead and tell us what you think, whether it’s about the entire project or individual pieces. See you soon when the 2000th entry is verified!