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

Quoting: BielFPsWhile 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.

Quoting: BielFPsEven 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!

Quoting: GuestSo, 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.

Quoting: GuestSo, 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

Quoting: rustybroomhandleHmmm, 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

Quoting: ArehandoroFor 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.

Quoting: GuestSo, 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.

Quoting: ArehandoroFor 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.