The Valve Steam Deck, scheduled for release in December, has so far taken the form of a portable PC for Steam's game library. But that may not be the case, at least not at launch. [According to James B. Ramey, president of software developer CodeWeavers, the company is working with Valve to develop a Proton compatibility layer that will support the Steam Deck's Linux-based SteamOS. Stream games are quite unlikely to run on portable computers, he noted.

Before you rush to cancel your Steam Deck pre-order, it's worth remembering that Proton supports 16,000 games if you are lucky enough to get one. That's quite a lot, probably more than you'll play in a lifetime, but not all of the Steam library.

However, Ramey's comments were echoed by Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais, who told IGN, "The games we want to make playable are really the entire Steam library. We haven't found anything yet that we can throw at this device that it can't handle."

Ramey, who participated in the Boiling Steam podcast, suggested that Griffais' words in the interview may have been misunderstood, and that gamers seem to believe that the console can run all Steam titles upon launch Ramey added, "I don't think that's the case, explained that while the Steam Deck will be hardware powerful, not all Steam games will be supported immediately.

"I think he was trying to say that the device itself, the hardware specs of this device can support any game. I don't think he was necessarily referring to supporting that game with Proton.

As Rock Paper Shotgun points out, neither Ramey nor CodeWeavers was directly involved in the creation of the Steam Deck. However, they do have insight into compatibility from their work with Proton.

Therefore, in the early days of Steam Deck, you may find that some of the games you want to play will not run on Steam Deck. However, Steam Deck is supposed to be open, so if there are incompatibilities, workarounds or fixes will likely be made later.