With 13 days remaining until its official launch on February 25, the number of Steam Deck Verified and Playable games has ballooned to 520! For those keeping score at home, that’s a larger collection than the Nintendo N64 had in its entire lifetime.
Valve’s QA team has been furiously playing through Steam’s massive library to see what’s playable on Deck. As of today, the current breakdown looks like this:
- Steam Deck Verified games: 309
- Steam Deck Playable games: 211
- Unsupported games: 60
But There Are 1000s More!
As a reminder, games classified as “Steam Deck Verified” or “Steam Deck Playable” are titles that Valve has checked for playability. The Verified-tier games offer a native-like experience, as if the game was explicitly designed for the console. Playable-tier games mean that certain elements like text size or controls schemes might not be ideal for the handheld.
But don’t forget that these are just the games Valve has personally tackled so far. It doesn’t include the thousands of games with native Linux versions. Nor does it include the additional thousands of Windows games rated playable at ProtonDB.com.
Boiling Steam estimates an average of 22 new games are being validated every day. At this pace, the number of officially Verified and Playable games will exceed 1000 at launch. But I’m predicting at least 1500, judging by how aggressively Valve is testing these in the past several days.
If we’re calling Steam Deck a console, it’s already poised to have more playable games at launch than any console in history. However you choose to classify it, we can agree that a ridiculous number of games are waiting to be enjoyed.
I do wish we had insight into the exact procedure Valve uses to QA-check these games. Is some of it automated? How are they determining which games to check? What criteria, if any, will make Valve return to the Unsupported games and recheck them?
UPDATE: Tired of waiting for sites like this one to report these numbers? Find out how to list these games yourself with this simple guide.
Stick around for more coverage, walkthroughs, news, and impressions of Steam Deck. I have a review unit and will be able to discuss a lot more after February 25, including SteamOS 3.0.
I think this is going to raise the visibility of Linux in the public, and get consumers to start looking at it as a possibility.
I sure hope the Steam Deck is a hit, even though I’m not a gamer.