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While there are issues with the Deck Verified system, Valve continues on noting down more titles as being either Deck Verified or Playable.

As of publishing time there's now 1,214 going by Valve's own list, which is a huge number for a gaming device that has only just recently released. With 660 Verified and 554 Playable. One of the biggest titles to appear recently of course was Apex Legends, the massively popular Battle Royale.

Remember though: not being Verified or Playable doesn't mean it won't work, it just means it hasn't been through Valve's formal certification yet.

For games to be fully Verified they need to hit these marks:

  • Input - The title should have full controller support, use appropriate controller input icons, and automatically bring up the on-screen keyboard when needed.
  • Display - The game should support the default resolution of Steam Deck (1280x800 or 1280x720), have good default settings, and text should be legible.
  • Seamlessness - The title shouldn’t display any compatibility warnings, and if there’s a launcher it should be navigable with a controller.
  • System Support - If running through Proton, the game and all its middleware should be supported by Proton. This includes anti-cheat support.

There are still some lingering questions I have about it, now I've been testing for multiple weeks: like how they test the performance? As I've been through multiple games that are fully Verified that drop well below 30FPS. I hope this is something they will improve as testing continues.

Also, today, I had a chat with Jason Evangelho from Forbes / Linux4Everyone, Nick from The Linux Experiment and Gardiner Bryant who have all also been reviewing the Steam Deck. Expect some videos and audio over the next few weeks from our chat on the Steam Deck, Valve, Linux and plenty more.

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elmapul Mar 9, 2022
Quoting: SolitaryRealistically, there is no rush to cover entire catalogue, because not all games are being actually played or have been played by any significant number of gamers in recent time (especially if those games are not a good fit for Deck anyways). Nobody really waits for the Deck rating of the Asset Flip #345: The Sequel. If Valve rates all games that cover 95% (or more) of all Steam users/owners they are good as finished and that might not be such a big task, the rest they can slowly do over the years or just change the methodology by then.

The number of games is inflated, let's be honest.

i agree that assetflips dont make a difference, but there is a bunch of high quality games that people dont play anymore because they already got tired of the countless hours playing it or moved to sequels

that is especially bad for those like me who waited those games to run on linux to play then.
CatKiller Mar 9, 2022
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Quoting: Guest
Quoting: CatKillerBecause I like numbers:
65,237. Today.


Is that only games? How many of the total number are GNU+Linux native?
You could just click the link.

Yes, just games. Although the number's gone up to 65,240 in the time between my prior post and now.

9,705 of them are Linux-native.
Solitary Mar 10, 2022
Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: SolitaryRealistically, there is no rush to cover entire catalogue, because not all games are being actually played or have been played by any significant number of gamers in recent time (especially if those games are not a good fit for Deck anyways). Nobody really waits for the Deck rating of the Asset Flip #345: The Sequel. If Valve rates all games that cover 95% (or more) of all Steam users/owners they are good as finished and that might not be such a big task, the rest they can slowly do over the years or just change the methodology by then.

The number of games is inflated, let's be honest.

i agree that assetflips dont make a difference, but there is a bunch of high quality games that people dont play anymore because they already got tired of the countless hours playing it or moved to sequels

that is especially bad for those like me who waited those games to run on linux to play then.

Linux gamers aren't that different from other people. If some game is so dead that nobody has been playing it then I doubt there is any significant number of Linux gamers waiting for it... and waiting for Deck rating of all, not the game itself. Also if it was highly played (countless hours) game then it does not fit in my description, that's a game with probably high count of owners and playtime... and will be or probably is already rated.

I might obviously be off in my expectations. But I think I can quite confidently say that 95% of ownership/playtime of games does not equal to 95% of Steam library, but what is the real number is what decides how much work Valve has to do to make the coverage so high that the actual numbers stop being relevant.
slaapliedje Mar 10, 2022
Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: SolitaryRealistically, there is no rush to cover entire catalogue, because not all games are being actually played or have been played by any significant number of gamers in recent time (especially if those games are not a good fit for Deck anyways). Nobody really waits for the Deck rating of the Asset Flip #345: The Sequel. If Valve rates all games that cover 95% (or more) of all Steam users/owners they are good as finished and that might not be such a big task, the rest they can slowly do over the years or just change the methodology by then.

The number of games is inflated, let's be honest.

i agree that assetflips dont make a difference, but there is a bunch of high quality games that people dont play anymore because they already got tired of the countless hours playing it or moved to sequels

that is especially bad for those like me who waited those games to run on linux to play then.
I sort of want to dev a game called 'Asset Flip: The Game' and just have a bunch of random assets slapped onto things. It could also be a slid / flip puzzle :p
Purple Library Guy Mar 10, 2022
Quoting: Solitary
Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: SolitaryRealistically, there is no rush to cover entire catalogue, because not all games are being actually played or have been played by any significant number of gamers in recent time (especially if those games are not a good fit for Deck anyways). Nobody really waits for the Deck rating of the Asset Flip #345: The Sequel. If Valve rates all games that cover 95% (or more) of all Steam users/owners they are good as finished and that might not be such a big task, the rest they can slowly do over the years or just change the methodology by then.

The number of games is inflated, let's be honest.

i agree that assetflips dont make a difference, but there is a bunch of high quality games that people dont play anymore because they already got tired of the countless hours playing it or moved to sequels

that is especially bad for those like me who waited those games to run on linux to play then.

Linux gamers aren't that different from other people. If some game is so dead that nobody has been playing it then I doubt there is any significant number of Linux gamers waiting for it... and waiting for Deck rating of all, not the game itself. Also if it was highly played (countless hours) game then it does not fit in my description, that's a game with probably high count of owners and playtime... and will be or probably is already rated.

I might obviously be off in my expectations. But I think I can quite confidently say that 95% of ownership/playtime of games does not equal to 95% of Steam library, but what is the real number is what decides how much work Valve has to do to make the coverage so high that the actual numbers stop being relevant.
Maybe, but at the current pace they're barely keeping up with the number of games released, so they have little to spare for rating anything in the back catalog. I still think they'd better speed it up some.
DS-TechMedia Mar 10, 2022
Quoting: F.UltraI guess every one have already seen this but it appears that Google have been busy writing their own Proton/Wine from scratch: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22969081/google-windows-games-stadia-emulator hopefully they will release it as open source at some time.

I was so confused at first when I opened this article because I thought it was saying "Stadia will now be able to run Windows games." And I was thinking...what? Isn't that all Stadia is for?
But okay yes I see now. And yeah, pretty exciting honestly. I wonder how different their setup is from Proton since it's designed for scale. I'd imagine they're using pooled hardware resources rather than provisioning actual GeForce GPU's per user, but I think they market the packages like that to customers.
Nocifer Mar 10, 2022
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Solitary
Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: SolitaryRealistically, there is no rush to cover entire catalogue, because not all games are being actually played or have been played by any significant number of gamers in recent time (especially if those games are not a good fit for Deck anyways). Nobody really waits for the Deck rating of the Asset Flip #345: The Sequel. If Valve rates all games that cover 95% (or more) of all Steam users/owners they are good as finished and that might not be such a big task, the rest they can slowly do over the years or just change the methodology by then.

The number of games is inflated, let's be honest.

i agree that assetflips dont make a difference, but there is a bunch of high quality games that people dont play anymore because they already got tired of the countless hours playing it or moved to sequels

that is especially bad for those like me who waited those games to run on linux to play then.

Linux gamers aren't that different from other people. If some game is so dead that nobody has been playing it then I doubt there is any significant number of Linux gamers waiting for it... and waiting for Deck rating of all, not the game itself. Also if it was highly played (countless hours) game then it does not fit in my description, that's a game with probably high count of owners and playtime... and will be or probably is already rated.

I might obviously be off in my expectations. But I think I can quite confidently say that 95% of ownership/playtime of games does not equal to 95% of Steam library, but what is the real number is what decides how much work Valve has to do to make the coverage so high that the actual numbers stop being relevant.
Maybe, but at the current pace they're barely keeping up with the number of games released, so they have little to spare for rating anything in the back catalog. I still think they'd better speed it up some.

You have to keep in mind though that many (and I'd dare say most) of these new games fall into that same "asset flip #345" category, i.e. they're useless crap that practically nobody cares about playing, period, let alone playing them on the Deck. It's like how the Android store has "tens of thousands of apps" when in reality it's more like a couple of thousands if you exclude the crap. Or how Debian or the AUR have thousands of packages.

In my totally anecdotal opinion, I wouldn't expect the Real Games™ being published per year to be more than a few hundred at most (and I'm being generous here because nowadays making "games" has seemingly become the pastime of every other schoolkid and their mother, so I'll be nice and assume that the number of Real Games™ has also increased in direct proportion to the crap).

Still, I'd have expected that Valve would have taken care of certifying the existing Steam catalogue before the Deck's launch, at least in part. But I sort of get it, seeing as this is a completely new type of device with lots of quirks that needed ironing out even at the last minute, both in hardware and in software terms. You can't certify your games today if the capabilities of the device are bound to change tomorrow.

Quoting: F.UltraI guess every one have already seen this but it appears that Google have been busy writing their own Proton/Wine from scratch: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22969081/google-windows-games-stadia-emulator hopefully they will release it as open source at some time.

It's funny how every player in the "let's take advantage of Linux to boost our bottom line" arena has quickly reached the conclusion that without compatibility with the already existing catalogue of Windows games, their service will never really take off. The only difference here is that Valve is a minuscule company compared to Google, so what took Valve a whole decade to do (make Linux machines -> fail miserably -> realize you need Windows compatibility -> invest in a compatibility layer -> profit) only took Google a couple of years; and they apparently even wrote their own Windows emulator from scratch instead of relying on Wine and its quirks, so their solution could very well prove to be an order of magnitude better/faster. Still, until I see it I won't believe it. And if it's not fully open sourced I won't even bother - the whole point of this "gaming on Linux" endeavour is to enhance the open source ecosystem with new tools and capabilities, not just to play mah gamez on a non-Windows OS.


Last edited by Nocifer on 10 March 2022 at 10:54 am UTC
questioner9 Mar 10, 2022
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyOK, so the article saying they hit a thousand games came out 5 days ago. So, 5 days to do 200 games, pace of 40 games/day.

That's not bad. But at that pace, in a year they would do 14,600 games. How many games are in the Steam catalogue again? And how many come out in a year these days? They need to ramp it up a bit if they want to be able to say anything about the Deck running all your games.

Remember that's figures for Verified/Playable only, Unsupported is still a rating that means a game has been processed (albeit not a rating we want to see). So they are getting through the catalogue at a faster pace than 40/day generating a verified/playable additional 40/day.
adibuyono Mar 10, 2022
Wonder how many titles noted as unplayable?
CatKiller Mar 10, 2022
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Quoting: adibuyonoWonder how many titles noted as unplayable?
775.
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