A lucky few have managed to get their hands on the Steam Deck – and an even luckier few got it specially hand delivered by Gabe Newell himself. Regardless, the Steam Deck is out in the wild, and so its trial by fire begins. Valve has also announced that it now has over a thousand games that have been 'Verified' or 'Playable' for it's handheld console. But what do these terms mean?
In a blog post, Valve explained that compatibility rating numbers are always changing, as over time, developers are constantly tweaking systems or adding new features like controller support, or enabling anti-cheat on the console. Additionally, changes to the console's Proton compatibility layer further adds to the fluctuating numbers.
"As this work takes place, our existing standards for titles to get a Verified or a Playable rating are very high," explained the blog. "If a game shows controller glyphs 99% of the time but tells you to 'press F' sometimes during gameplay, that's Playable, not Verified. 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."
"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."
On the developer side of things, Valve has also introduced a new feature that allows devs to directly communicate with customers about Steam Deck compatibility. Each game will include a tab where – along with its Playable compatibility details – there will be a link to the dev's blog detailing out Steam Deck related updates for said game.
The blog post signed off saying now that the Steam Deck is out there, Valve would love to hear any feedback that customers may have.