I hope you’re making progress on your Steam backlog because Valve has no intention of starving you for games. Within one month of launching, the Steam Deck has hit an incredible milestone: 2007 certified Verified and Playable titles.
Notably, 81 of those 2000+ games were released for PC just this year. Some standouts include God of War, Core Keeper, Tunic, Elden Ring, and Death Stranding Director’s Cut. And more than half of those 2000+ are games released after 2019, so there’s a healthy variety of fresh content.
The data comes courtesy of SteamDB, which I confess to frantically refreshing multiple times per day. The site doubles as another way to track the Steam Deck Verified games already in your personal library. I can drill down to see which Rogue-lite games I own that are playable on Deck and released after 2021(Vampire Survivors, Deathloop, Tribes of Midgard and Gunfire Reborn, cool!)
It’s worth mentioning that your favorite games might be perfectly playable even if Valve hasn’t tagged them as such. And in many cases, even if Valve has deemed them “Unplayable.” ProtonDB is a useful site to check Steam Deck playability as it recently added dedicated Steam Deck reports.
Obviously, there exists the potential to add thousands more games to the “playable” list when adding emulators to the equation…
2000 Steam Deck Verified & Playable Games… Kinda
For all my enthusiasm about the ever-expanding library, Valve’s Deck Verified program isn’t without its faults. Take Vampire Survivors, which I’ve spent hours playing. As a “Verified” game, it should run flawlessly, but Valve’s testing program clearly didn’t reach the late-stage action. After about 24 minutes, there’s so much activity onscreen that the framerate reliably plummets to single-digits. This can spell certain death, which is far from the experience you’d expect.
As Gaming On Linux reports, there are at least a dozen more. These include DOOM (2016) and Hitman, both Verified titles that don’t recognize gamepad input. Elsewhere, Sonic Generations also drops to single-digit framerates, and Call of Juarez: Gunslinger has videos that won’t play.
That’s probably why Valve wisely launched a user-feedback system, letting gamers opt-in to providing feedback after they’ve played a game. I was recently asked about my experience with The Witcher 3 (screenshot above). So don’t hesitate to hit those blue buttons; the more data Valve has, the better the experience for all Steam Deck owners.
Do you think we’ll hit 5000 by the end of 2022? All I know is that I already have enough games on Deck to play for years to come!
