Valve just released a new feature that lets you sign in to Steam And check to see how many games in your library will be playing on the new handheld Steam Deck. I ended up with Much There’s been a lot of games over my time in this job, of all kinds and eras, so doing testing on them can be a useful real-world indicator of how things are shaping up before a device is released.
As of today (Feb 24, 2022 in Australia), I have 810 actual fit games in my Steam library. This sounds like a lot of video games, but I’ve been doing this job for 15 years, which involved quite a few companies/people sending me games to check impressions/reviews, so they all add up over time. It’s not like I bankrupted myself in the name of grand strategy games and roguelikes.
Given the number of games included, but also the variety – most of these I’ve had to check out professionally, not those I’ll meet in person – I was curious to know how many of these games are currently approved for play, so I ran the test and got some surprising results.
Here’s how the test rocked. First, the games are 100% ready-made for the Steam Deck platform. Out of the 810 games in my library, I only had 59 fully supported games, ranging from NBA 2K22 to MGSV to alien isolation to Yakuza: Like a dragon. I have no idea what Glory football tactics He does there, and I think I’ll go blind trying to play Third villain On a small screen like that, but I appreciate it works regardless.
Next: Games “that run on Steam Deck, but may require additional effort to interact with or configure.” There were 66 people in this category, and while many of them fall into the “you really need a monitor and mouse to play these” category (like Paradox games, football manager series and City prospects), there were other players who might be hoping to be ready by now, like Doctrine killer titles and Skyrim.
Which finally brings us to the list of games that simply don’t work, and this is where I got my biggest surprise. I was expecting this to be a massive catalog of failures and dead ends, but instead only 23 games were welcomed, because there is actually a secret fourth category and a bonus.
Look, these are just the games that were confirmed do not work. Leave me 632 games that exist only untested. Maybe they will work, maybe they won’t. I can’t even see a list of them so I have to work backwards via exclusion, but in this category there are some recent big EA releases (FIFA 22And the Battlefield 2042) and Microsoft (infinite auraAnd the Forza Horizon 5)
Maybe they’ll work by version (early users should get the unit in a week or two), maybe not! I am sure that wherever there is an absence of an official appointment, these pioneers will test everything they own and share their results.
Note that this is not a permanent record or criticism of the service or platform. As Valve says, the number of compatible games will grow over time through both testing and updates, and the more users can share their gaming experiences, the more we’ll know about how desktop-only titles previously worked on a handheld device.
And if you want to see some general stats regardless, here they are; At the time of publication 1,084 games have been officially tested, with 399 verified, 327 playable but problematic and 358 unsupported.
I thought this would be a useful real-world example of the kind of alignment results people can expect when they first get their hands on the first wave of units coming out!