Another big milestone has been reached by Valve with their handheld Linux gaming PC, with the Steam Deck hitting 17,000 games rated playable or verified.
Plus many more games work with minor tweaks or through emulators.
That doesn't even put into consideration all the games that run perfectly fine, but have no proper input support, or those that require minor tweaks/mods, as mentioned. The number would have been colossally larger as a result.
Still unbelievably impressive though, granted that any of "proper" consoles will never see a game library of this scale
Same. I mean… a positive second chance for me, because 20 something years ago setting up Wine to run Quake 3 was an afternoon’s effort, and absolutely not worth it lmao. Nowadays I know that I can just try a game, see if it works. Doesn’t? Let’s try again. Still nothing? Proton GE. Nothing? Ok, doesn’t actually work, unless there’s a solution on ProtonDB. 50/50 it’s anticheat.
Plus… it’s plain fun to get “unsupported” games and running them on the Steam Deck! Yeah, probably there’s a reason, but that time I played in VR using the Deck? Let’s call it perverse enjoyment.
And those are just verified. There are thousands of games that require nothing to play, there's just a minor thing preventing Valve from approving it. (For example, a link to a web page in the main menu disqualifies it)
"Wait... I'm just realizing that's the count of Steam Verified games in my personal library. We are waiting to hear back if any of the 15 games I have not purchased on Steam impact this total."
I have a Deck and one thing I learned pretty quick is that some devs will mark their game as Steam Deck Verified when it damn well is not. There are some games that struggle to run on the Deck but still have the green check, so I feel claims like this are highly misleading. Also there are some games that have no compatibility information at all yet work great.
Devs have zero say about Valve's "verified" checkmark. You can make a perfect game and tune it for the Deck, and wait forever for Valve to bless it. Or you can put out AAA crap that barely gets 10fps on a GodBox and is loaded down with launchers and NTKERNL.DLL anticheat, and gaben will give it a ✅ months before release.
The verified certification program is going just great.