Summary
About a month ago, Valve announced that it would expand its long-standing Steam Deck Verified program to the now-shipping Steam Machine, offering a separate rating of Steam games’ compatibility and playability for the fresh living room-focused hardware. Now that those ratings started appearing on Steam store pages last night (under a “Learn More” link next to Steam Deck Compatibility), we’ve found that Valve is frustratingly “still learning about” Steam Machine compatibility for dozens of games that the Steam Deck is too weak to run capably. The Steam Machine compatibility for many Steam games is pretty simple to figure out, of course. If a game is already verified on Steam Deck, it is seemingly guaranteed to be verified on the Steam Machine, as far as we can tell. On the other side, games that have already been confirmed not to work with SteamOS (which can happen for various reasons) obviously won’t work on the SteamOS-powered Steam Machine. The messy middle is where a Steam Machine Verified badge could come in most handy. These are games that Valve has confirmed will load on SteamOS, but which the aging, portable Steam Deck can’t handle at the 1200×800, 30 fps standard that Valve requires at default settings (for the Steam Machine, this requirement grows to 1080p and 30 fps). On the Steam Store, these games show up as “Unsupported” on Steam Deck because “the game’s graphics settings cannot be configured to run well on Steam Deck” or “this game requires manual configuration of graphics settings to perform well on Steam Deck.” Ultimately, the only way to really know if a game is going to work with SteamOS/Wine is to try it and see. The verification is really only for people that may want to buy the game to play specifically on Linux. Nothing is stopping a Steam user from trying games they already own to see if they’re playable on their Deck/Machine/PC-of-their-Choice-running-Linux. The only thing you’re going to be out of in that case is your bandwidth cap + time. *In TA’s case, it executes fine, but the computer opponents can fire any long range weapon completely across even the largest maps. Apparently there are assumptions in the ranging code that aren’t valid to make when running on Wine. The most important thing at this point is whether it can run in SteamOS or not. Also it’s worth noting that despite being 4+ years old now, there are still many games that are flagged as “unsupported” or “unknown” for the Steam Deck, yet work perfectly fine. I recommend anyone using SteamOS/Linux to check ProtonDB for a second opinion whenever considering a game, because Valve’s official status is often either out of date or lacking.