Valve has announced an ambitious new feature for the upcoming Steam Deck called “Deck Verified” that will, at a glance, give players an idea about how well games will work on this new portable PC.

According to the announcement page Valve is reviewing the entire Steam catalogue to sort every single game into one of four categories:

• Verified: The game works great on Steam Deck, right out of the box.
• Playable: The game may require some manual tweaking by the user to play. E.g. requiring user to manually select a community controller config, needing to use the touchscreen to navigate a launcher, etc.
• Unsupported: The game is currently not functional on Steam Deck.
• Unknown: We haven’t checked this game for compatibility yet.

Each of these categories is given a small symbol which will appear by default when browsing games on the Steam deck so that players can gauge general compatibility at a glance.

The Verified status, indicated by a green check mark, is obviously what most games will want to achieve. To get a Verified status Valve outlines four key features which must be accounted for: input (works well with the Steam Deck controls), seamlessness (no compatibility warnings), display (resolution that matches the Steam Deck, legible text) and Steam support (middleware be supported by Proton, anti-cheat support).

Anyone who has spent any amount of time PC gaming will know that most games don’t launch and run seamlessly and will almost always require some fiddling in the options menu before working as intended or playing nicely with your PC.

The criteria for Verified is then seemingly difficult to achieve but, much like console gaming, there is a chance that developers and publishers can create some default setings when the game detects that it’s being run on a Steam Deck.

We’re also a bit weary of Valve’s claim that it is testing all the games on Steam. Earlier this year the platform crossed the 50 000 mark and hundreds of games are added every single day. Even with some automation software to speed up this process it would be a massive undertaking.

The first orders of Steam Decks are due to be sent to customers this December with more purchasing options and availability in 2022. We’ll have to wait until at least December to see how comprehensive Deck Verified is.