Back in October, Valve laid out the specific review guidelines that a Steam game would have to follow to earn an optional "Deck Verified" badge on its Steam Store page. Now, the results of the first of those verification reviews are starting to leak out, and they're showing some minor input and interface issues across a handful of games running on Steam Deck.
While the Deck Verified badges have yet to show up on the Steam Store itself, the metadata surrounding the program is already being added to the Steam backend for some titles ahead of the Steam Deck's planned launch next month, as picked up by services like SteamDB. Of the 86 games with verification review results so far, 41 have at least one issue preventing them from receiving a full "Verified" badge.
First, the good news: Almost all of those un-verified games are still rated as "Playable" under Steam's guidelines. Only five reviewed games so far have received the dreaded Steam Deck "Unsupported" badge from Valve. Four are virtual reality games, which fail for the simple listed reason that "Steam Deck Does Not Support VR Games." The fifth, Persona 4 Golden, seems to fail because in-game videos use a problematic Windows Media Player codec that could be difficult to implement through Steam Deck's Linux Proton compatibility layer. "Valve is still working on adding support for this game on Steam Deck," the game's metadata says.
Every single "Playable" or "Verified" game, on the other hand, has a "default graphics configuration [that] performs well on Steam Deck." That lines up with Valve's July promise that the Steam Deck will be able to run "really the entire Steam library" at 30 fps with the device's native 800p resolution.
Not perfect, but still “playable”
The common issues that differentiate a "Verified" game from a merely "Playable" one on the Steam Deck often amount to input annoyances. In 15 of the 36 "Playable" titles identified so far, for instance, a launcher or setup tool "may require the touchscreen or virtual keyboard or have difficult-to-read text," according to Steam.
There are also 14 games identified so far in which "entering some text requires manually invoking the on-screen keyboard" and 11 that "require use of the touchscreen or virtual keyboard or a community configuration." A total of 13 games don't support "external controllers for the primary player," which could be a problem if you want to plug in your own device via USB.
Visual interface problems are also relatively common in the first batch of Deck Verified reviews. Unreadably small text has been identified as a problem in nine titles, while 14 "sometimes show mouse, keyboard, or non-Steam-Deck controller icons" when played on the Deck.
The Deck Verified program also goes out of its way to identify games that require an Internet connection either for first-time setup (11 titles so far) or throughout single-player gameplay (nine titles). This is a notable issue for Electronic Arts games, which require the use of the third-party Origin client on top of Steam's own DRM and could make playing on the go more difficult.
While this initial list of Steam Deck compatibility problems is far from a randomly chosen scientific survey, it's still an interesting look at the small issues that are likely to affect some titles when the hardware launches. It will be interesting to see how many "Playable" titles issue updates to achieve full "Verified" status after the Steam Deck is in players' hands.
Keep reading for details on the 86 games that have been reviewed for the Deck Verified program as of this writing.
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