Steam Deck Verified and Playable hit a thousand games

Great news

Update: Valve has formally addressed the false negative verification reports in a new post:

QuoteIf 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.

Quoting: GuestIt was Greg Coomer in an interview (RockPaperShotgun iirc) who said valve had only tested a thousand to date. I'm not assuming anything.

Ah, thanks, I found it. Hadn't seen that interview.

Relevant section:

QuoteGame compatibility checks: Valve has said it would check every game in the Steam game library (50,000+ games and counting), to see if it will run well on the Deck. So far, it's only managed to check about 1,000 games.

• “It’s a daunting task,” Coomer says of the hand-checked process, which assesses things like text readability. Valve prioritized checking games that were popular among people who pre-ordered the Deck.


• The company will review whether it is going too slow or needs to "invent some other way of evaluating games.”

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: dibzI 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 guess I took "Playable" as fixable, though it looks like other people clarified this in later comments (which made me not quite right regarding the definitions but not entirely wrong either that they'd want to distance themselves from them). In my head, fixable would mean it takes work to make it run but then would otherwise be similar to Verified; so it'd still be "unsupported" if things like too-small interface elements kept it unplayable after it was running properly. That said, it doesn't sound like that's the case, but honestly, I think it probably should be as it makes a lot of sense.

Quoting: dibz

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: dibzI 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 guess I took "Playable" as fixable, though it looks like other people clarified this in later comments (which made me not quite right regarding the definitions but not entirely wrong either that they'd want to distance themselves from them). In my head, fixable would mean it takes work to make it run but then would otherwise be similar to Verified; so it'd still be "unsupported" if things like too-small interface elements kept it unplayable after it was running properly. That said, it doesn't sound like that's the case, but honestly, I think it probably should be as it makes a lot of sense.

Well, it's not quite what I thought it was, either. Seems like what's coming out of this is what Valve means by "Playable" is there could be things that aren't smooth, like input being tricky or interface elements being annoying, but every single part of the game has to actually run--no missing cutscenes, no minigames that don't happen and so forth. So according to them it's factors like those that are moving games that it seems we can play, into "Unsupported".

Now I feel like we could use a category for games that actually don't run at all.