Over 50,000 Steam Games To Be Verified For Steam Deck Compatibility

The Steam Deck developers have announced that they are entering a phase of deep testing of Steam games for compatibility with Valve's new handheld console. Due to the fact that there is a large number of games in the online store, exceeding the threshold of 50,000 titles, the developers had to hire a whole team of testers to check the games for compatibility. The information appeared in the publication "Rock, Paper, Shotgun", to which Valve commented.

All games will be tested against four main criteria:

• input device support
• screen resolution and comfortable readability of the text on it
• general Steam Deck compatibility
• compatibility with Proton, which is a compatibility layer for running games on Linux

Valve recently announced a Steam Game Compatibility Indicator for the Steam Deck. Some of the titles may require additional configuration before launching on a portable device.

• Titles that will be fully compatible with the game on the Steam Deck will have a green checkmark next to their name. These games are categorized as "Fully Compatible". They can be simply downloaded from the Steam Deck and played without any preconfigurations. To receive this status, the game must produce at least 30 FPS on the device.
• Projects that need some customization or community-made controller layout or additional touchscreen customization will have an "i" next to the game icon on a yellow background. These games are categorized as "Playable".
• The latter category includes titles that do not meet any requirements and cannot be played on the Steam Deck. The icon for such games will have a gray circle with a crossed out space inside. Such titles are categorized as "Not Supported". They will probably be able to move later to other categories, but there are no details about this yet.
• Games that fail Valve's Steam Deck testing will be categorized as Unknown. Her label is a question mark.

The process of checking games is quite time consuming, and therefore it will take a lot of time. It is likely that Valve will be hiring additional staff to help the core team review games for compatibility. In addition, if the games are not approved by the testers, then the developers can try to fix the problem and make a second request for review of the game, which will increase the volume of testers' work.

The first batch of Steam Deck with a price tag of $ 399 will be released on December 21 this year. Only those users who have pre-ordered Steam Deck will be able to get the device.