As the release of Steam Deck draws ever closer, Valve continues sharing more details about its highly anticipated portable gaming PC, and the company has now announced it’ll reviewing the entire Steam catalogue to create a new compatibility ratings system.
As outlined in Valve’s latest video, all games on Steam will fall into one of four categories – Verified, Playable, Unsupported, and Unknown – giving Steam Deck users an easy, at-a-glance means of checking compatibility with their system.
Verified games, denoted by a tick in a green circle, are said to ‘work great’ with Steam Deck, right out of the box. More specifically, these titles must pass all checks falling within four testing categories: Input, Seamlessness, Display, and System Support.
Verified games should, for instance, support the Steam Deck’s default resolution (1280×800 or 1280×720), have “good default settings”, and legible text. They’ll also feature full controller support, use appropriate input icons, and automatically bring up the on-screen keyboard.
Additionally, Verified titles won’t result in compatibility warnings, and launchers must be navigable with a controller. Finally, in instances where a game is running through Proton, both the game and its middleware – including anti-cheat – should be supported by Proton.