Steam Deck Verified and Playable hit a thousand games

Nice Valve have already Verified/Playable more then a thousand games!

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.

Ori and the Will of Wisps is also marked as unsuported, but plays perfectly in proton.

"What's interesting is that the Unsupported category is growing quickly, with a lot of titles thrown into it over the last few days. "

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 plenty of games being Unsupported, but on SteamDB you can only see that "Valve is still working on it". For example Aliens vs. Predator.

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".

There 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.

I wonder if some devs have not perhaps explicitly asked for some games to be marked as unsupported. Counter-point to this would be Europa Universalis, because other paradox games are verified/playable.

Seems the opposite is also true, as noted by Laura Kate Dale on Twitter with a Verified game not working at all. Oh dear. Valve have to get this right and quickly.

When there are enough Steam Deck users, they should probably plonk in a bit of crowdsourced reporting like how ProtonDB works, with a short mini-survey.


Last edited by rustybroomhandle on 4 March 2022 at 3:01 pm UTC

I guess I remember reading somewhere that Verified required more then the game to just work and that there were other requirements like fonts and interface elements not being too small. I have a strong feeling that rather then tagging games into the playable category that hit those problems, they put them under Unsupported.

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.

There 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.

There 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.

Well, the native build was bad... I had played and 100% completed the game before the poor native version even came to exist and it ran great even back then. Checking now, the game still works just fine.

I guess I remember reading somewhere that Verified required more then the game to just work and that there were other requirements like fonts and interface elements not being too small. I have a strong feeling that rather then tagging games into the playable category that hit those problems, they put them under Unsupported.

But then what's the "playable" category supposed to be for? Valve's definition has been that if it works just right, it's Verified, and if it works, but not just right, with problems like the ones you mention, it's Playable.
If they instead stuff all those in Unsupported, they've got two categories instead of three and they no longer have a category for things that actually don't work. It subtracts a lot of information, and worse, it's information they say they're giving you. If they're doing that it's a stupid move.
Maybe one of their QA people is just incompetent. Or maybe they're doing a thing where in some cases they send off an email to the developers about flaws and bung the game into Unsupported until they hear back--but you'd think they could leave it officially Untested, or maybe Playable, and just have an internal flag that they're waiting for feedback/changes.

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.

People unclear on the concept. You don't "offer" a Proton version, Proton runs your normal Windows version. Or doesn't, but either way it's not a special "Proton version".

I guess I remember reading somewhere that Verified required more then the game to just work and that there were other requirements like fonts and interface elements not being too small. I have a strong feeling that rather then tagging games into the playable category that hit those problems, they put them under Unsupported.

But then what's the "playable" category supposed to be for? Valve's definition has been that if it works just right, it's Verified, and if it works, but not just right, with problems like the ones you mention, it's Playable.
If they instead stuff all those in Unsupported, they've got two categories instead of three and they no longer have a category for things that actually don't work. It subtracts a lot of information, and worse, it's information they say they're giving you. If they're doing that it's a stupid move.
Maybe one of their QA people is just incompetent. Or maybe they're doing a thing where in some cases they send off an email to the developers about flaws and bung the game into Unsupported until they hear back--but you'd think they could leave it officially Untested, or maybe Playable, and just have an internal flag that they're waiting for feedback/changes.

Ethan Lee once said to me, "Valve are incompetent", and this seems to confirm it. There's a reason they shouldn't be relying on Proton and a reason people should take what Valve say with a large pinch of salt.

They're already doubling down on their claims of "Deck will play your entire Steam library" (it won't, because that's impossible).

From what I remember this statement was just misunderstanding, they meant that the hardware is capable to run your whole library, not that everything will work on the SteamOS 3.

Maybe a two month delay wasn't long enough?

Realistically no delay would have been long enough. This (like pretty much all consumer electronic products today) are a WIP and the consumer is the Alpha/Beta tester to some extent. It's just the way things are, the question is did they ship it in a good enough condition to be considered stable, workable and a good enough consumer experience out of the gate and from what i am seeing that is a yes, perhaps a too narrow of a yes for some but this is still early days.

Maybe a two month delay wasn't long enough?

Realistically no delay would have been long enough. This (like pretty much all consumer electronic products today) are a WIP and the consumer is the Alpha/Beta tester to some extent. It's just the way things are, the question is did they ship it in a good enough condition to be considered stable, workable and a good enough consumer experience out of the gate and from what i am seeing that is a yes, perhaps a too narrow of a yes for some but this is still early days.

No product is ever in perfect state, it's always just decision if it's good enough to be released.

Maybe a two month delay wasn't long enough?

Realistically no delay would have been long enough. This (like pretty much all consumer electronic products today) are a WIP and the consumer is the Alpha/Beta tester to some extent. It's just the way things are, the question is did they ship it in a good enough condition to be considered stable, workable and a good enough consumer experience out of the gate and from what i am seeing that is a yes, perhaps a too narrow of a yes for some but this is still early days.

No product is ever in perfect state, it's always just decision if it's good enough to be released.

that's pretty much what i said. and i agree.

Ethan Lee once said to me, "Valve are incompetent", and this seems to confirm it. There's a reason they shouldn't be relying on Proton and a reason people should take what Valve say with a large pinch of salt.

I don't think there are any reasons they shouldn't be relying on Proton which are anything close to big enough to outweigh the reasons they should be relying on Proton, or rather have little choice but to rely on Proton.

But certainly this particular issue cannot be construed as a reason they shouldn't be relying on Proton. To the contrary, it seems to indicate that Proton is performing much better than they are currently admitting. Why they would be claiming that games don't work on Proton when in fact they do remains beyond me, but it obviously can't be a problem with Proton.

Before the 25th of February, Valve were claiming they'd tested "thousands of games" and people assumed what was visible via SteamDB was because of data mining.

However, it's since emerged Valve have only tested 1,000 since the Deck's announcement and the two month delay was because Valve were working on fixing things from feedback given by developers. It wasn't a component shortage after all, it was simply because the software wasn't ready.

It does seem they have tested fewer than the "thousands" they were indicating. Although not only 1,000, because 1,000 is just the ones rated verified or playable; a rating of unsupported also indicates testing has been done. Well, in theory at least.
But the rest of what you say has "since emerged" may perhaps be true, but can hardly be said to have "emerged". Certainly it's the first I've heard any such thing, and I've been following Deck news fairly closely. You suspecting or alleging something doesn't mean it has "emerged", which connotes some kind of consensus based on new evidence becoming public.

Thanks Liam for testing some of these Unsupported titles. I suppose from Valve's point of view it's probably better to err on the side of caution and mark something as Unsupported rather than risk marking something as Verified or Playable that doesn't work, but still, it's weird that so many games that run fine are being marked Unsupported instead of Playable. I really wonder what's going on.

I guess I remember reading somewhere that Verified required more then the game to just work and that there were other requirements like fonts and interface elements not being too small. I have a strong feeling that rather then tagging games into the playable category that hit those problems, they put them under Unsupported.

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.

Yes, there are certain criteria that must be met in addition to a game running flawlessly in order to be marked Verified (having to do with font size, correct controller glyphs being shown, and other things to ensure a good experience). Games that run flawlessly (or at least as good as they do on the desktop, no game truly runs flawlessly after all) but don't meet those criteria go in the Playable category, at least according to what Valve has said. Unsupported is specifically for games that flat-out don't work, due to e.g. anti-cheat, or are not, well, supported, like VR titles. So if they're putting "games that run but aren't Verified" in Unsupported, then they've either deliberately muddled up their own (nice and simple) system or someone is doing it mistakenly. (Hopefully it's the latter, and will be fixed soon.)

Before the 25th of February, Valve were claiming they'd tested "thousands of games" and people assumed what was visible via SteamDB was because of data mining.

However, it's since emerged Valve have only tested 1,000 since the Deck's announcement

You're assuming they've released information on every game they've tested. Now that's not necessarily a bad assumption (I'm inclined to agree with it), but it's also possible that releasing this information is more complicated than "check a radio box on a web form somewhere and have it automatically update", and that Valve actually do have hundreds of thousands of ratings pending that they're still processing. "Never attribute to malice, etc.," and even the most ardent Valve defender would have to concede that they can be, on occasion, a bit incompetent.