Steam Deck gains momentum as 1,000+ games now certified as playable

techradar.com:

Valve has announced that it's reached the milestone of over a thousand games working well with the Steam Deck.

In a blog post, Valve revealed that there are now more than 1,000 titles which have ‘Verified’ or ‘Playable’ status for the handheld gaming PC.

Verified is the gold standard for compatibility with the Steam Deck, and games which get this certification from Valve work well with the portable right out of the box. Those which are Playable are, as the name suggests, perfectly playable, but may need some tweaking by the player to get the best experience.

Games in either category as good to go, essentially, and there are now in excess of a thousand of these, with Valve expecting to make good progress in terms of evaluating more games as time rolls on.

Freshly certified titles include Elden Ring, in case you missed that, which launched at the same time as the Steam Deck as a fully Verified title. We took an in-depth look at how Elden Ring plays on the Steam Deck, if you're interested.

It’s obviously good to see this milestone reached, but of course, it doesn’t mean there are only a thousand games (or so) that play nice (mostly) with the Steam Deck. There are tons of others, no doubt, it’s just that Valve’s team need to get round to testing them all and applying the correct status (until then, they’re marked as ‘Unknown’).

As time rolls on, improvements are going to be made in terms of better support for anti-cheat software, fixing bugs with Proton – the compatibility layer that the Steam Deck uses to run Windows games on its Linux OS – and possibly developers tuning their games for controller support, to pick a few examples. In other words, the compatibility landscape will be constantly evolving, and Valve took the time to