The Steam Deck is launching soon, and with Valve’s promise of the device delivering a full-fledged handheld PC gaming experience, it certainly has a lot to live up to. Of course, considering its OS and the Proton compatibility software, there are going to be questions about whether or not certain games in Steam’s massive library will be able to run on the Steam Deck. Valve, however, is in process of figuring out just that.
Valve has announced the Steam Deck Compatibility program, which, as its name suggests, will see Valve testing out and reviewing every game in the Steam library to see whether or not they will run on the Steam Deck.
“While many games run great on Deck out of the box, this shift means there are some games that, while they may be great on a desktop PC, aren’t a great experience on Steam Deck,” Valve writes. “We want it to be easy for you to find great gaming experiences on Steam Deck, so we’ve designed a system to do just that.”
Upon review, Valve will put each game into one of four categories- Verified (which suggests that the game works perfectly fine on the Steam Deck), Playable (the game is playable, but “require some manual tweaking by the user to play”), Unsupported (games that are not currently functional on the device, such as Half-Life: Alyx), and Unknown (games that haven’t yet been tested).
For a game to be Verified, it will need to check four boxes. As explained by Valve, these are:
- 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 (1280×800 or 1280×720), 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.
Meanwhile, every game on the Steam Deck store and your personal library will give you information based on Valve’s testing of it.
“We’ve already started reviewing titles and will continue to check games through launch and beyond,” Valve concludes. “This is an ongoing evaluation of the entire catalog and a game’s rating can change over time – titles will be re-reviewed as the developer releases updates or the Deck’s software improves.”