Steam Deck hits over 4,000 titles marked either Verified or Playable

Last night I saw a shooting star in the sky which had a tux logo on it. From it I knew that this piece of news would come today. Great. Over 4000 games. Viva la revolution!Time is near....

This is the best hardware I have ever purchased. Yes my steam library like many is fairly large from collecting and bundles over the years and that is great.

Using retrodeck the emulation is nothing short of amazing.

And the flatpak lutris that is a one click install in discover allows you to manually install gog games so much easier now, and has a checkbox in the process to automatically add it to steam. I don't think Ill ever buy a gaming tower ever again. There isn't much I would want to play that the deck can't handle and it is just THAT good.

I wasn't sure during the wait for it. Some days/weeks I would be excited, others I was thinking about cancelling it. But once you get your hands on it and experience it, it is difficult to describe.


Last edited by twinsonian on 17 July 2022 at 3:07 pm UTC

Discovering this community since I got my steam deck. Thanks for this site !
Noob question, all games that run on the steam deck would work on a linux pc as well? Shall I jump into a linux experiment.... wait I just did. first time on a linux desktop to install the emulation on the deck.

Discovering this community since I got my steam deck. Thanks for this site !
Noob question, all games that run on the steam deck would work on a linux pc as well? Shall I jump into a linux experiment.... wait I just did. first time on a linux desktop to install the emulation on the deck.

Steam deck is the hardware, the console itself. It comes installed with Steam OS, which IS a linux distribution.
To keep it simple: yes, the games that work on steam deck should work on your desktop/laptop with Linux installed.
But in reality it's a bit more complex, as the GPU would be different, the version of the drivers or of wine/Proton may differ, … but in general yes, it should work. At least I have no problem with it :D

Noob question, all games that run on the steam deck would work on a linux pc as well?

Yes and since a non-handheld is usually more powerful and has different outputs and inputs, the amount of games running better should be even higher.
You don't have to worry about small text, high power consumption, missing joystick and gamepad input and the likes :)

It's currently sitting at 1850 verified and 2093 playable, for a total of 3943 games according to Valve's official numbers.

Where are you seeing "over 4000"?

Steam only lists games that are currently available to buy. SteamDB (and the verification process) shows games that are on Steam even if you can no longer buy them.

It's currently sitting at 1850 verified and 2093 playable, for a total of 3943 games according to Valve's official numbers.

Where are you seeing "over 4000"?

I'd guess https://www.protondb.com/. I don't think Steam provide an official count, and as we've already established, the number is meaningless anyway. A game that is verified today could be unplayable by tomorrow (but still listed as verified). Likewise, a game that is listed as unsupported could work fine with a little tweaking.

It's currently sitting at 1850 verified and 2093 playable, for a total of 3943 games according to Valve's official numbers.

Where are you seeing "over 4000"?

Steam only lists games that are currently available to buy. SteamDB (and the verification process) shows games that are on Steam even if you can no longer buy them.

Bingo, this exactly.

Edit: the official Steam store list also doesn't even work correctly, when sorting by date of the compatibility note it's a mixture of both old a new so it's not overly helpful.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 17 July 2022 at 2:00 pm UTC

I got 50% of my Steam library tested now, so they seem to do a good job of getting the more important games tested first.

Funny how pre-Steam Deck the number of playable games on Linux was never celebrated. Maybe that’s been the missing piece to the stigma. This is just something I noticed on other gaming sites.

People love their Steam Decks and most of the love isn’t even about portability but that the games run fine. No one seems to be able to attribute this back to Linux, WINE, or any community behind ProtonDB that did the work before Valve helped put the pieces together. Valve gets a lot of credit and rightly so but I do feel it is a bit over-attributed. Which is too bad, because mainstream media will do as much as possible to make it seem like they were always cool. ;)

Yes and since a non-handheld is usually more powerful

lol. My desktop is around a decade old. It was pretty beastly back then. I may or may not sell it because this Deck is going to be more powerful. With the money, I could get some eHDD caddies and another USB dock.

I wouldn't have my space heater anymore, though.

Funny how pre-Steam Deck the number of playable games on Linux was never celebrated. Maybe that’s been the missing piece to the stigma.

I think we didn't care about Proton as much and it wasn't this good. It seems like things have improved by leaps and bounds over the last year or two.

Also, because this thing is decidedly a console, there's a specific piece of hardware to tie to. It's a console first and running "SteamOS"

No one seems to be able to attribute this back to Linux, WINE, or any community behind ProtonDB that did the work before Valve helped put the pieces together.

This makes me sad but, it's not surprizing. In the western european world, community is a dirty word outside of church. Looking at the bigger picture, that's at best a marketing term by big corporations to sell the idea that they're not what they are.
Things tend to be very simplified. It's easy to point to one thing but, once you've got to start rattling off a bunch of different names, technologies, communities... the masses are equipped to not be able to handle that. It's goes against capitalism and the slave-owner mentality of colonialism. The commonfolk are supposed to be good worker bees for companies, not some sort anarchic hippie free thinker contributing to a grassroots community that equalizes everyone.

But maybe I'm reading too much into this.

I'm still waiting for a little Tux icon with a proton in per belly, or just an atom. I think we need something to show the game works under Proton specifically. Steam could really just show a little Deck-like icon. The rest of the stores (Humble Bundle, Itch, GOG, IndieGala, am I missing any?) could stick to the particle.


Last edited by EWG on 17 July 2022 at 5:01 pm UTC

What would be nice is a 4th category. Keyboard Required. Like a game that runs perfectly fine, but needs a keyboard to play it.

I should attempt to set up a portable setup to play the Gold Box games....

What would be nice is a 4th category. Keyboard Required. Like a game that runs perfectly fine, but needs a keyboard to play it.

I should attempt to set up a portable setup to play the Gold Box games....

That would be a handy tag. I know there are Groups that focus on touchscreen friendly games.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/touch-friendly-games
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/touchscreengames
Apparently there is a "Touch-Friendly" tag. I've never seen that one before.

That's sort of the opposite of what you were talking about?

I think in time the keyboard required thing could be overcome for most games.
I could see some MMOs that have a great many abilities almost requiring a keyboard but, those also have many "clickers" so perhaps leaving a cursor near some skillbar would defeat the limited selection of hardware buttons. Unsure what else absolutely needs a keyboard besides typing games. lol

What I'd still like to see.. is the Steam Controller 2 with a proper mini-keyboard built in. Along with a dim/not distracting RGB backlight for the whole thing.
It'd be great for a day at the library or café. Hand your friend the controller and set up a larger portable screen...

.. I just realized.. that'd make the Deck almost NDS or Wii U like one screen on a "controller"/console. Now.. if there were some way for games to support Player 1 on one screen and Player 2 on another...
Maybe a workaround would be to have two versions of Steam running but, it wouldn't be able to handle running double of many games. hmm.
(multiseat? dated page)


Last edited by EWG on 17 July 2022 at 5:57 pm UTC

Discovering this community since I got my steam deck. Thanks for this site !
Noob question, all games that run on the steam deck would work on a linux pc as well? Shall I jump into a linux experiment.... wait I just did. first time on a linux desktop to install the emulation on the deck.

While the general answer is "yes", there are some things to keep in mind when dealing with Windows-games running through Proton:

• Graphics drivers. The open source AMD Linux drivers and the closed source nVidia Linux drivers have some edge cases under which they behave differently. The most important one is the situation that a game runs out of video memory. In the case of the AMD open source drivers, that will lead to a performance drop because system memory is used as a fallback. With nVidia's closed source drivers, the game will crash. This means that if you have an nVidia card, some games might not work on the desktop that are working fine on the Deck (which uses the AMD open source drivers).
• There are some subtle differences between Deck and desktop when it comes to video playback, that I haven't fully understood yet. It might be that you need to install GE-Proton on the desktop to get videos running in some games. I'd still try Valve's official Proton builds first, but if those fail to play videos, GE-Proton might get them working.
• For some titles Valve considers important, there might be Steam Deck specific fixes.

Long story short, the best experience on Linux is still offered by games that have a native Linux build, but Proton can get a lot of Windows games running too.
I'd recommend to check protondb for Windows-only games you care about, especially if you are using an nVidia graphics card (-> check the GPU the users reporting failure/success were using).

The Switch currently has currently 4404 games, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games

Where will the Steam Deck be after 5 years?

The Switch currently has currently 4404 games, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games

Where will the Steam Deck be after 5 years?

Well, let's see, assuming a linear extrapolation, and that Valve's been rating things for roughly half a year at this point, about 40 thousand games. (Don't put too much stock into this back-of-the-envelope calculation though!)

Now that I've got my Deck in hand and have been enjoying it for a week and a half, I'm finding myself more personally invested in these numbers. Also in proper controller support for games, now that I own one for the first time.

Now that I've got my Deck in hand and have been enjoying it for a week and a half, I'm finding myself more personally invested in these numbers. Also in proper controller support for games, now that I own one for the first time.

I had been TV gaming through Steam Link to a Linux box the past couple years and having good controller support is very helpful. I played Giants Citizens Kabuto and having Steam Input was a life saver, but it was a huge pain to setup all of the control schemes for the 3 races. I could see that game tagged with keyboard required, but is the end it wasn't.

I let my two nephews take a look at the Deck. They played Fallguys via Epic and Guardians of the Galaxy which is marked as playable. I got two big thumbs up from them.

They were especially interested in the fact that it is a PC and that it basically can run everything.

The Switch currently has currently 4404 games, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games

Where will the Steam Deck be after 5 years?

There could be surely more working games than any major console currently in the market, but people has to verify also very unknown games. Unfortunately there are around 64k games in the Steam store, and the ProtonDB website has shown that around 70% of the recorded games have a silver (or better) rating. Ideally, if we assume that that percentage is evenly distributed along all games, we could reach around 45k games supported on Linux/Steam Deck.

The Switch currently has currently 4404 games, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games

Where will the Steam Deck be after 5 years?

There could be surely more working games than any major console currently in the market, but people has to verify also very unknown games. Unfortunately there are around 64k games in the Steam store, and the ProtonDB website has shown that around 70% of the recorded games have a silver (or better) rating. Ideally, if we assume that that percentage is evenly distributed along all games, we could reach around 45k games supported on Linux/Steam Deck.

I mean how many of those games are the kind that are asset flip trash? There's a decent percentage of those...

There are definitely types of games that just won't fit smoothly with controller + touch screen as the only input. And some that are just plain going to be more playable with mouse / keyboard.

But even if only a 5th or a 3rd of Steam games get full Deck support, it'll be one of the largest game libraries ever. Not to mention all the emulation potential!