With the Steam Deck finally in the hands of customers around the world, Valve continues to busy itself with testing the compatibility of all 50,000+ Steam games. Now, the company shares that it’s hit a new milestone in the amount of videogames it’s certified for the handheld gaming PC.
In a Steam Community post, Valve celebrates that “over a thousand games are now Verified or Playable on Deck” and discusses what exactly this means for the present and future of its portable powerhouse. The company emphasises that any compatibility rating is subject to change, meaning that many videogames could soon shift from ‘playable’ or ‘unsupported’ to and gain that coveted ‘verified’ status with a bit of work from developers.
For example, Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment was able to quickly move the game from ‘unsupported’ all the way up to ‘verified’, likely after updating the game’s implementation of Easy Anti-Cheat. However, this kind of fix may not be so simple for other developers and games like Warhammer: Vermintide 2.
In a bid to improve communication between Steam Deck users and developers, Valve has introduced a new feature that allows development studios to point players in the direction of community posts relevant to Deck compatibility for their games. This should help alleviate any confusion of when (or if) a developer is working to make their videogames work on the portable PC.
While it’s great to see Valve getting popular games up and running on the Steam Deck, if the company keeps up this pace it’ll be quite sometime before we know how all 50,000+ games run on the Deck. At the time of writing, the largest compatibility category is ‘unsupported’, totalling in 763. By comparison, there are 668 ‘verified’ and ‘555’ playable games.
