Valve launches Deck Verified, to show off what games will work well on the Steam Deck

I give this all of a week after launch to find that many games that have a certain rating fail the expectations of that rating.

I'm counting on Steam Deck to skyrocket Linux usage, or at least to bring more games to linux based OS

I don't see that happening at all. There is a better chance of customers installing Windows on the Steam Deck than that happening. Proton has shown that it will only lower the amount of native Linux titles being made not increase it.

All Proton has shown is that it's actually easier to port the game with Proton than to make a custom "native" release. Developers will make native ports if the performance is better than Proton and Steam Deck is popular. That's not wishful thinking, that's just plain common sense, from a developer's point of view.

Due to "appropriate controller input icons" alone, I feel like a lot of games will fall short of Verified. I rarely see the right icons for my DualShock.

Same with me, but note that they need the game to show the Deck's icons correctly (i.e. xbox icons), not all controllers!

Due to "appropriate controller input icons" alone, I feel like a lot of games will fall short of Verified. I rarely see the right icons for my DualShock.

Same with me, but note that they need the game to show the Deck's icons correctly (i.e. xbox icons), not all controllers!

The SD has ABXY buttons, but not RB/LT etc. For some reason, Valve decided to take these from Playstation and they’re L1,R2 and so on. Plus, the shape of the d-pad is very different to the one from Xbox 360, which still seems to me as the most popular controller, so the icons will still be wrong if a dev does nothing.

I have no interest in buying a portable game device. This thing is not for me at all.

However, Valve is doing everything right here. I am very impressed with the Deck and its roll-out. I sure hope it helps improve Linux gaming in general.

And finally, my friends will stop asking me if it works on Linux for every new coop game.

That's exaclty what I always complained they should have done... and not just for the deck, but also the link and the big picture experience. So, good initiative by them. It remain to be seen how meticolous are with this initiative (is there an actual check, or is it just the publishers claiming they comply? Is there also a human review passage? What's about patches? Can they ensure there are no regressions? To many companies love launchers and they upgrade them separately from their games. Etc etc)

Due to "appropriate controller input icons" alone, I feel like a lot of games will fall short of Verified. I rarely see the right icons for my DualShock.

Same with me, but note that they need the game to show the Deck's icons correctly (i.e. xbox icons), not all controllers!

The SD has ABXY buttons, but not RB/LT etc. For some reason, Valve decided to take these from Playstation and they’re L1,R2 and so on. Plus, the shape of the d-pad is very different to the one from Xbox 360, which still seems to me as the most popular controller, so the icons will still be wrong if a dev does nothing.

I personally wish they would use full blown Playstation buttons. Never really used an Xbox controller except at friends places (I did have one for my rpi at some point). They just do not feel right in hand, Dualshock tends to feel way better, and D-Pad was quite mushy on the x360, so not a big loss I would say ? And considering the outcry every time a game dev removes the ps button when they port to PC, I doubt I am the only one who prefers dualshock. I also don't think x360 is all that popular ? Maybe in US, but worldwide I highly doubt it. Maybe it had some extra usage due to being easier to setup at some point, but I don't think it was out of love.

I have no interest in buying a portable game device. This thing is not for me at all.

However, Valve is doing everything right here. I am very impressed with the Deck and its roll-out. I sure hope it helps improve Linux gaming in general.

I don't really have any interest in using one either as I basically never leave the house and don't particularly want to play games outside of home. That said, I've reserved a Steam Deck and set aside the money for it - I see it more as a way to support Valve's efforts to make gaming on Linux a viable alternative to Windows and to improve cross-platform development efforts in general.

So I see two advantages over ProtonDB that should make the whole setup a lot more viable.

First, the Steam Deck being just one thing, one target--same OS, same hardware. It works on it or it doesn't, no worries about what your graphics card is or are you using Arch or Ubuntu or Suse or whatever.

Second, this setup motivates the developers to come to them. With luck and reasonably strong sales (which seem pretty likely), developers will be making sure their game runs on the Steam Deck, and going to Valve to get "verified".

Well, a third: There's something to be said for it being someone's job to get it right. Crowdsourced stuff is great, but quality can be variable.

I'm counting on Steam Deck to skyrocket Linux usage, or at least to bring more games to linux based OS

I don't see that happening at all. There is a better chance of customers installing Windows on the Steam Deck than that happening. Proton has shown that it will only lower the amount of native Linux titles being made not increase it.

This will be a new situation. What Proton "has shown" so far will not apply to it.

More analytically--yes, Proton probably lowers the number of native Linux titles made for any given market share. So if you compare a situation where Linux gaming has 1% on Steam and no Proton vs. Linux gaming has 1% on Steam and there is Proton, it seems reasonable to say the second situation will result in fewer native games.
Same if you compare 5% without Proton vs 5% with.

But that does not tell us that a situation of 1% Linux gaming on Steam without Proton will have fewer games than 5% Linux gaming on Steam with Proton. Proton tends to result in fewer native games, higher market share tends to result in more, and we don't have a track record to tell us which effect would be stronger.

And that 5% isn't a purely random figure. We don't know how much the Steam Deck is going to sell, but I don't get the impression 4 million or so Steam Deck sales in the next year or two is out of bounds. That kind of number would boost the number of Linux gamers on Steam to around 5% from its current ~1%. And that massive increase could not have happened without Proton.
I strongly suspect that if the Steam Deck sells at that level or more, the impact of higher market share pushing for more attention to native Linux will be greater than the Proton effect reducing it. And it will have significantly eroded the chicken/egg growth problem for Linux gaming either way.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 19 October 2021 at 8:00 am UTC

While I believe this is no problem for Valve itself (putting the mark of shame outside the deck), I expect some publishers to not like this decision and can result in some lawsuit or they leaving steam because of that.

Well, technically you can sue anybody for anything, but I highly doubt this will be an issue. Giving users informations about supported features on Steam is normal. That's like publisher taking offense that the Steam store page says that the controller isn't supported or that it does not run on Mac or SteamOS+Linux.

How can it be "mark of shame" if the publisher releases the game only for Windows and does not care about some other (new/different) platform? Do you expect that they will lose Windows users because of this new platform that the game isn't even running on?

Publisher might take some flak from users, just like they do if users demand controller support, bugfixes or hell... Linux support. Same is going to be with Deck support. But that's all between users and the dev/publisher.

Hmmm, optimistically if they have 20 people each checking 20 games a day, that's 400 games per day, more or less 8000 per month. They won't even be halfway through by launch.

Even so, there are literally thousands of games on steam, and manually reviewing them will take a lot of time. Remember that this situation is different from something unofficial like Protondb, because this seal is Valve officially stating how well the game runs on deck so they can't mess up with it.

You're putting it mildly. Over 10000 games have been added to Steam in 2020 alone!

So, this is essentially a Proton whitelist 2.0. The one that Valve have abandoned after a couple of Proton releases.

Yeah, sounds very convincing I would expect that thousands of games will stay with "Unknown" status forever. Maybe Valve will check the compat once in a while for the "hype game of the month" like Doom Eternal or Cyberpunk 2077.

A lot of games remain unrated, but the bottom line is that the developer can say that they want to be evaluated. Personally, I'm guessing that the games Valve chooses will have a lower priority than the games that ask for it.

So, this is essentially a Proton whitelist 2.0. The one that Valve have abandoned after a couple of Proton releases.

I do hope that native Linux games will get their check and hopefully their badge early.


Last edited by Eike on 19 October 2021 at 9:34 am UTC

Hmmm, optimistically if they have 20 people each checking 20 games a day, that's 400 games per day, more or less 8000 per month. They won't even be halfway through by launch.

And then they shall re-check all those games with every update in case developers break something or introduce unsupported features.

For me, the key point is here:

"System Support - If running through Proton, the game and all its middleware should be supported by Proton. This includes anti-cheat support."

Emphasis is mine.

Does that mean a game can be verified for Windows on Steam Deck but not Linux/Proton? If that's the case, I don't see that going down too well...


Last edited by Arehandoro on 19 October 2021 at 10:41 am UTC

For me, the key point is here:

"System Support - If running through Proton, the game and all its middleware should be supported by Proton. This includes anti-cheat support."

Emphasis is mine.

Does that mean a game can be verified for Windows on Steam Deck but not Linux/Proton? If that's the case, I don't see that going down too well...

Verified on Proton, not Windows. What matters is the end result (people can click a button on their deck and start to play) not how a studio achieves that result. Gamers and their gaming experiences are the importat thing here.

So, this is essentially a Proton whitelist 2.0. The one that Valve have abandoned after a couple of Proton releases.

Yeah, sounds very convincing I would expect that thousands of games will stay with "Unknown" status forever. Maybe Valve will check the compat once in a while for the "hype game of the month" like Doom Eternal or Cyberpunk 2077.

You mean, they abandoned publicly. Do you really think Valve has disclosed everything they've been doing behind the scenes during these past couple of years? Of course not. As soon as Proton turned from a mere compatibility tool into a full-blown product which will probably shape the business paradigm of Valve for years to come, any progress has obviously been carefully curated because it's now a trade secret that needs to be kept away from the competition's eyes, at least until it's ready to be properly revealed/launched. That's also why SteamOS 3.0 is also not being publicly developed, even though it's an open source Arch-derived distro.

Same with this curation list; I seriously doubt it's an initiative that will be launching only just now, after this public announcement - I fully expect them to have been at it for at least a few months already, and to be almost at the end of the process. A corporation worth their salt do not announce a new product unless they can be certain that it's capable to do what it will be advertised to do, especially a corp like Valve who have learned this lesson firsthand with the Steam Machines.

For me, the key point is here:

"System Support - If running through Proton, the game and all its middleware should be supported by Proton. This includes anti-cheat support."

Emphasis is mine.

Does that mean a game can be verified for Windows on Steam Deck but not Linux/Proton? If that's the case, I don't see that going down too well...

No, it means they still can be Linux native.