Gabe Newell’s company puts all games on Steam into four categories regarding its portable PC, Steam Deck that will ship to the first customers later this year.

On Valve‘s page, the company detailed the four categories. Verified means that the game has full controller support with no compatibility warnings, plus it supports the Deck’s native resolutions and complete system support (from middleware to any anti-cheat software). In other words, the game will run flawlessly on the device. Playable means some tweaking might be required. For example, Valve mentions if a “user [has] to manually select a community controller config, needing to use the touchscreen to navigate a launcher, etc.” then it falls into a Playable category. So you can play it, but not in an out-of-the-box manner.

The other two categories are more straightforward: Unsupported means the game doesn’t work (and Valve used an in-house example, namely Half-Life: Alyx, as it’s a VR title, and the Steam Deck is a portable PC, it’s not going to work). Unknown means Valve doesn’t know if the title in question would run on the Steam Deck yet; its compatibility has yet to be checked. And since Valve wants to review every game on Steam, it might take them some time to check everything. If you see an icon with a green tick, it’s Supported; a black i in an orange circle is the Playable category, while the crossed circle is the Unsupported.

The icons are currently not visible on the regular Steam store pages, but they will be on the Steam Deck (but this situation is likely to change, meaning the icons will surface on an ordinary PC, too). Looking at a game’s storage page will also reveal why it is in a Playable state. For instance, Team Fortress 2 has “missing or inaccurate controller glyphs”, and that you’ll need to use the virtual keyboard for some features.

“We’ve already started reviewing titles and will continue to check games through launch and beyond. This is an ongoing evaluation of the entire catalogue, and a game’s rating can change over time – titles will be re-reviewed as the developer releases updates, or the Deck’s software improves,” Valve claims. You will launch Steam on the Great on Deck tab with titles optimized for the platform, but you can click on the tab to switch to the regular Steam page.

The task and the time to complete it is enormous.

Source: Gamesindustry, PCGamer