An ongoing question surrounding Valve's Steam Deck is how many games it will actually run. Initially, the device appeared to be capable of running the entire Steam library, but in reality it only supports about 16,000 games.

However, to make it easier to see which games will run on the Steam Deck when it arrives in December, Valve has released a Steam Deck compatibility program.

The Steam Deck Compatibility program categorizes games into four different categories. Verified" are games that work "right out of the box, on Steam Deck," and "Playable" are games that require manual tweaking by the player. Unsupported" are games that, unsurprisingly, do not work with the Steam Deck; "Unknown" are games that Valve has not yet verified as compatible with the Steam Deck.

For the verified tag, the game must fully support the controller, run on Steam Deck resolution 1280 x 800 or 1280 x 720 with default settings, not display a compatibility warning, and fully support Proton if it runs on the platform

Therefore, the system must fully support Proton.

Therefore, when you access the Steam Store with Steam Deck, you will see a tab called "Great on Deck" that shows all Steam games that have been verified so far. This tab has not been added to the desktop version of Steam, so if you have not yet decided whether or not to purchase a console, you will not be able to see a preview of which games will work on Steam Deck or in that app.

That said, this new program should provide an easy way to see what games will run on Steam Deck and decide whether to play them on a console or a gaming PC. And Valve seems to be deeply involved in providing additional information about Steam Deck, from videos tearing down Steam Deck to simple tips for developers to verify their games for Steam Deck.

We have yet to try Steam Deck, but every new piece of information from Valve makes the console/PC hybrid more interesting.