Valve’s Steam Deck verified games library has passed 30,000 titles, four years after the handheld forced publishers and developers to take Linux compatibility seriously during development. SteamDB’s tracking data puts the combined total of games rated Verified or Playable at just over 30,000, spanning everything Valve has tested for its handheld and for SteamOS more broadly.
How Steam Deck verified games are rated
Valve grades every Steam game against Steam Deck compatibility on a four-tier scale: Verified, Playable, Unsupported and Unknown. A Verified game runs without extra setup, with readable text, a controller-friendly default configuration and no reliance on anti-cheat or launchers that Proton cannot handle. Playable means the game works but needs some manual adjustment, such as a virtual keyboard for text entry or a tweak to the default controls. Proton, Valve’s compatibility layer built on Wine, is what makes most of this possible: it translates Windows API calls so that games built with no Linux support in mind can still run on SteamOS.
A fourth tier, Unknown, covers everything Valve has not tested yet, which is different from Unsupported: that rating means a title was tested and failed to clear the bar, whether for missing controller support, unreadable on-screen text, or reliance on anti-cheat software that does not work under Proton.
ProtonDB, the community-run counterpart to Valve’s own data, tracks a related but separate metric: how much of what people are actually playing carries one of these badges. By its numbers, 40 percent of the current Steam Top 10 by concurrent player count is Verified or Playable, rising to 46 percent across the Top 100. That gap between a top-10 and a top-100 figure is the more useful one for anyone deciding whether to buy a Steam Deck for a specific game, since chart-topping new releases are the ones most likely to still be missing full support.
Where the trackers disagree
The exact count depends on who is doing the counting. SteamDB reports 30,023 Verified or Playable titles. KitGuru’s own pull from SteamDB, via Gaming on Linux, has it at 30,026 games, broken down as 21,076 rated Verified and 8,950 rated Playable, against 6,845 still marked Unsupported. ProtonDB’s figure sits lower still, at 29,988. None of the three is wrong: SteamDB and ProtonDB pull from different snapshots on different schedules, and Valve itself revises ratings after the fact as testing turns up problems.
KitGuru points to Crimson Desert as an example: it launched rated Playable and was later downgraded to Unsupported after more players ran into it. The reverse also happens and gets less attention, since a good share of the thousands still marked Unsupported reportedly run fine on Steam Deck and simply have not been through Valve’s testing queue yet.
What to watch next
Compatibility ratings will keep shifting as Valve pushes SteamOS updates, including the KDE Plasma 6.7 and Linux 7.2 changes in the SteamOS 3.9 preview we covered this week, since kernel and driver revisions routinely flip individual games between tiers. Anyone buying a game on the strength of a badge should still check its current status before purchase rather than trust the number at the top of the library.
Image: Thomas Vogt via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
