With Steam Deck expected to reach the hands of customers sometime next month, Valve is publicly labeling which games will and won’t work on the mobile PC.
Valve currently has four game classifications on the Steam Deck, with “verified” meaning that players will be able to play a game seamlessly, while “playable” games will require the user to make some changes. A decent number of Steam’s games will also be unsupported on the Steam Deck, namely all VR titles listed on the online games marketplace.
A list of all Steam Deck-rated games has been put together on SteamDB, although it’s much smaller than Steam’s full catalog, clocking in at just 67 titles. Of that 67, not every game is Steam Deck-verified either. A significant number of games, including Dyson Sphere Program, Valheim, Inscryption, and more are currently listed as “playable” on the Steam Deck. In many of these cases, in-game text is too small to read on the Steam Deck’s portable screen, or players have to use the Steam Deck’s touchscreen or on-screen keyboard.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a decent list of Steam Deck-verified games as well. Death Stranding, Sable, Noita, Cuphead, and many other titles are listed as working perfectly on the Steam Deck.
For the Steam Deck, this list will possibly determine whether or not the experimental console succeeds or fails. While the novelty of accessing a Steam library’s worth of games on the go is attractive, it won’t mean much of many of those titles are unplayable or require numerous tweaks on the part of users.