Valve’s new Steam Deck compatibility checker shows which of your games are handheld-ready
Check yourself before you Deck yourself
Time for another Steam Deck compatibility update from your Steam Deck compatibility correspondent. This time, Valve have launched a new tool that lets you check your entire Steam library for Deck readiness at once, sorting them into categories based on the results their ongoing compatibility testing programme.
SteamDB have been keeping unofficial track of which games have earned Verified (fully functioning), Playable (sufficiently functioning), or Unsupported (not functioning) status from this review process; the current combined count of Verified and Playable games has now ticked over 760. But finding the status of your own games meant combing through those lists manually, so this tool should provide a much more convenient alternative. To use it, just load up Valve’s new My Games page and punch in your Steam login details.
To be clear, it only lists games that have been through the review programme, and the vast majority of Steam games have not. That doesn’t mean these untested games will fail to run on the Steam Deck – many are bound to be Verified and Playable games in waiting – just that Valve haven’t got round to reviewing them yet.
Since the Steam Deck starts shipping on February 25th (two more sleeps, as younger me would have said) it’s inevitable that the portable PC will launch with a fair chunk of the Steam library unable to run on it. Still, there has been progress on this front. Proton, the compatibility layer that the Steam Deck uses to get Windows games running on its Linux-based SteamOS, updated to version 7.0 earlier this month; this included significantly improved support for Easy Anti-Cheat, a longtime SteamOS compatibility roadblock, as well as fixes for serious audio issues in games like Skyrim and Fallout 4. Both of those, by the by, are now in the Playable category.
In any event, more transparency is good, and this compatibility checker certainly nixes a lot of the guesswork around which of your own games will suit the Deck once it’s available. By all means, give it a go, and be sure to check back here on Friday for our full Steam Deck review.