Hi!
It's been an exciting week for us, as you can imagine. Not only have the first Steam Deck units made it to customer hands, but just yesterday we crossed another threshold --
over a thousand games are now Verified or Playable on Deck. This seems like a great opportunity to talk about what those Deck Verified numbers mean, both for the present and the future.
What it means
Whenever we talk about compatibility rating numbers, we emphasize that this is just a snapshot of a single moment, and that ratings change over time. Even as you read this, partners are working on adding controller support, enabling anti-cheat on Deck, and smoothing out the experience for players on Deck. At the same time, every day we're fixing Proton bugs that cause issues in some games, and adding new functionality to support others.
As this work takes place, our existing standards for titles to get a Verified or a Playable rating are very high. 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.
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.
New feature for developers
On that note, today we’re introducing a new feature to enable developers to directly talk with their customers about their title and Steam Deck compatibility. You can see an example of this on Rimworld, where their Playable compatibility details include a direct link to their
blog post outlining the work they are doing to make Rimworld work better on Steam Deck.
Let us know what you think
We're ecstatic that the Deck has shipped because only after real customers get to interact do we start getting real feedback and real data. While we worked hard to build the Deck Verified program as it exists, we're excited that now we get to iterate based on how you're really interacting with it. To that end, please continue to let us know your thoughts, whether about the program as a whole or individual titles.
See you soon for the 2,000th title!
