Exclusive: Here's how you'll know which games will run on Valve's Steam Deck - Rock Paper Shotgun

Valve have always maintained that the Steam Deck is closer to a conventional PC than a handheld console, and as such should be able to run your existing library of games on Steam.

But while the official Steam Deck Twitter is full of videos showing games performing well on dev kits, the compatibility status of many more games remains up in the air.

Ahead of the planned December launch, Valve have unveiled their plan to bring clarity on whether specific games will be able to run (and run effectively) on the Steam Deck.

It’s an ambitious plan, too: Steam games, of which there are tens of thousands, will be manually reviewed by Valve themselves, and assigned to a category denoting how well they work on the Steam Deck.

The ‘Unsupported’ category will cover games that aren’t sufficiently functional on the Steam Deck, and the final ‘Unknown’ category will contain games that Valve haven’t reviewed yet.

When you’re browsing Steam on the Steam Deck, games will display a badge marking their category (and thus degree of compatibility), hopefully making it much easier to know which of your collection will perform on the portable PC.

Steam’s library section will also get a new ‘Great on Deck’ tab solely containing games with Verified status, and even before the Steam Deck is released, Valve are aiming to let Steam users see which of their games will be compatible on launch?

To find out more about how the review and category system will work, I mailed some questions to Valve, and was replied to jointly by Steam Deck designers Greg Coomer and Lawrence Yang, who previously chatted to Katharine about the Steam Deck on its initial reveal.

Here’s what they had to say about the newly-announced compatibility programme, the criteria for Verified status, how Valve and other developers are collaborating to bring games to the Steam Deck, and a sadly hypothetical Gordon Freeman typing trainer.

Steam does have a lot of games, and Valve is putting significant effort into this review program.

We've hired an additional group of testers specifically for Steam Deck compatibility, and will continue to hire additional staff to support this group.

In terms of Proton support, we know some games use compatible anti-cheat like Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye, but their developers haven’t fully committed to making sure their games will be ready for the Steam Deck at launch.

What’s the mechanism for re-reviewing games that might not initially be playable, but gain full compatibility later.

We fully expect that some games will be reviewed multiple times - for example, when the developer releases a major update, addresses earlier compatibility failures to move their game into the Verified category, or when Valve fixes a Proton bug.

They can initiate a review, get feedback and notes whenever a game is reviewed, and can request a re-review if they make any big updates or improvements to their Steam Deck compatibility

So yes, they will be able to purchase, install, and launch games that are categorized in the compatibility review as "Unknown", and we will make sure they're aware of the game's status before doing so

In addition, the team is currently working on a new feature, to be released before Steam Deck's launch, that will let players check the compatibility category of each of the games in their own library

Having developed the criteria for Deck Verified status, is it still Valve’s intention for every game on Steam to be playable on the Steam Deck

Sure, you could plug a keyboard into Deck, but that's not the default experience so we wouldn't call a game like that a Verified title