In a recent update on the Steamworks Group on Steam, Valve gave an update on Steam Deck Verification and testing appears to be ramping up lately.
Valve confirmed in the post that they have already tested "thousands of titles" for Deck Verified. Their previous focus has been to prioritize titles based on playtime and interest from people who have reserved a Steam Deck, which appears to be an automatic process. They've also now given access to a small set of developers and publishers the ability to directly submit titles for review.
On top of that, they're beginning to increase the amount of titles going through verification, which makes sense considering we're getting close to the Steam Deck release on February 25.
Going by SteamDB, there's now 60 titles (as of publishing time) that are Deck Verified. Some of the most recent additions to this include: Baba Is You, Daymare: 1998, Hellish Quart, Death Trash, Paint the Town Red, Sam & Max Save the World, Roundguard and Wytchwood. There's a bunch that are also only noted as Playable, due to various issues like launchers, requiring the touch screen for initial setup and others. The number of games you can play with a few minor issues will be much larger overall.
Since they've tested thousands, they're of course not showing the entirety of what is actually Verified yet. Expect plenty more to suddenly appear over this month.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Philadelphus Feb 4, 2022
Quoting: Mountain ManThat doesn't mean the team is manually testing each and every game. I just can't see how that would be practical or efficient. But of course, I don't have Valve money, so perhaps I lack the correct perspective.I mean, I doubt they have people 100-percenting every single game to check that there isn't an obscure mini-game that shows up 57 hours in where the text is too small to read. Even I would find that unreasonable. But a look at the official criteria shows that some (if not most) of those things would be virtually impossible to test in an automated fashion. Pretty much all games come as precompiled binaries with no API to allow automated testing of their internals, so checking most of those things would require practically a world-class AI that knows how to use controllers to open games and check things like whether an arbitrary game's menu is traversable with just a controller.
Whereas, for most games, a human could check off the verified criteria reasonably comfortably in less than an hour (with the caveat that maybe there's a place where text size gets too small or something else breaks later in the game, but for most games an hour should give a reasonably good idea). Assuming a single person can thus check 8 games a day (1/hour, 8-hour working day), by hiring 100 people (using the loose change found down the back of the sofas at Valve HQ) they could verify 800 games a day. That'd then take them 80 days to check all ~64,000 games on Steam. That's gotta be way easier than doing the Tesla-levels of machine learning that would be required to do that testing automatically. (They also don't have to allocate testing time equally, they could spend more time on the most popular games and push the least popular ones off until after launch.)
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