Just about a week after the Steam Deck formally released, we have officially hit over one thousand games that are either Steam Deck Verified or Playable. Quite a fun milestone that, however quality is better than quantity and there's been some rather curious titles that have been through verification recently.
The hard numbers as it stands right now (SteamDB):
- 532 - Verified
- 471 - Playable
- 710 - Unsupported
Some of the recently verified / playable titles include: Spirit of the North, FIFA 22, Day of Infamy, Bastion, KeeperRL, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix and Alan Wake.
What's interesting is that the Unsupported category is growing quickly, with a lot of titles thrown into it over the last few days. These include: Persona 5 Strikers, Disgaea 5 Complete, Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY Edition, SMITE, Mortal Kombat 11, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Call of Duty: World at War and Arma 3.
Something strange has been happening though with Deck Verified on the titles being tagged as Unsupported. Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition as a first example is Unsupported, even though I tested it just this morning working without issue. Children of Morta is also set as Unsupported, I just tested it working fine. Europa Universalis IV as well is apparently Unsupported and yet it works. All tagged to use Proton too, and checking on each with the Native Linux build, they all also worked fine.
There's likely a longer list of this so I've contacted Valve to see what's going on there.
There's times Deck Verified is still working as expected though, like with Project Zomboid. Although they picked Proton here by default, and it doesn't run so they've set it as Unsupported. I thought perhaps there was an issue again with it picking Proton first instead of the Native Linux build, but that also doesn't run correctly with a wrong resolution and then a crash when trying to enter the game (I've sent the developer The Indie Stone details on this to help them).
Update: Valve has formally addressed the false negative verification reports in a new post:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.If 99% of a game's functionality is accessible, but accessing one optional in-game minigame crashes, or one tutorial video doesn't render, that's Unsupported.
For now! This is by design: around the launch timeframe, we believed it was more valuable to prevent false positives ("this game is Verified but part of it doesn't work"), even at the cost of some appearance of false negatives ("this game is Unsupported but I didn't notice anything wrong with it"). Even with the current standards, at the rate both we and partners are making improvements, we expect you'll see many titles transition over the next few weeks from Playable, or even Unsupported, to Verified. We also expect our standards and thinking will adjust as we move farther from launch and get much more feedback from customers and developers.
Hopefully Valve will now the Deck is out fix a steam bug from 2012. This bug prevents perfectly playable games to startup, because a CD key can't be given. Then it will finally possible to play Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood without tweaks.
i bet valve hold this info on purpose to not damage the image before launch, it was strange that the vast majority of the titles tested work, now the trend is something close to reality, with "unsuported" having more titles than verified or playable.
unlike the community made quality assurance (prodonDB) valve make sure that everything is working before it gain any seal of aproval.
that said, some games received regression.
i'm curious to see how they rate neptunia rebirth, since i have played it on both windows and linux and can confirm, it workflawless (or at least with the same bugs than on windows)
fortunatelly the brand is already in good shape, people were already excited by numbers like 800+ playable games so telling then that 710 games are unsuported now wont make then give up on purchase.
i was browsing reddit to see if many people were installing windows on it, and to my surprise this dont seem to be the case, the ones who tried had to deal with the lack of drivers, and considering that most of the posts werent people complaining but excited about the devices, playing/showcasing a lot of games they sucessfully run on it, i would say its a good call.
i hope valve can test and make most of their library work on windows before they relase the drivers, and hopefully that happens before Q2 shipments.
i hope they dont do anything crazy like announce steamDeck2 before the deck 1 was on the market for a few years, unless they plan to do something like:
annouce relase deck 2 a few weeks after they relase the drivers for windows on deck1.
with that strategy they can ensure that the demand for steamOS will keep existing, since the incentive to purchase deck1 and install windows on it will be competing with the desire to purchase deck2.
timed exclusive drivers may sound unfair, but that is not any different from what microsoft did to us by using and abusing their marketposition to give thenselves competitive advantage countless times.
I saw only two games (from 27 that are currently marked as unsupported in my library) that actually have a reason for being unsupported like Warhammer: Vermintide 2 with anti-cheat support missing and Total War: WARHAMMER III with "This game's graphics settings cannot be configured to run well on Steam Deck".
rustybroomhandle Mar 4, 2022
rustybroomhandle Mar 4, 2022
Last edited by rustybroomhandle on 4 March 2022 at 3:01 pm UTC
It would make sense really, they probably want to distance themselves from games that they see as "a bad experience" by just straight out saying they're not supported.
Quoting: SolitaryThere is quite a lot of games that seemingly work, but are labeled as Unsupported. Supraland for example, even though the standalone DLC Six Inches Under is Verified.
Speaking for this game specifically I asked the developers two years ago why they dropped and deleted the Linux native version and they said:
"we support proton. the native solution was bad and is dropped
low fps for reasons we cannot change"
I asked them last week "Wait what happened to the proton version?" And they said:
"i don't understand what's going on. we offer no proton version. but steamdeck seems to try to run everything using proton
valve says it has hitches"
They also clarified that siu is using a newer engine version and dx12 instead of dx11.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me