When Valve’s Steam Deck was launched back in February, it could only certified run a (relatively) handful of the platform’s 1000s of titles. The exact number was 399, but now, just a few weeks later, that number has roughly tripled.
On February 25, the day of Steam Deck’s launch, there were the 399 I just mentioned, plus a further approx. 300 more that were listed as “playable”, but that could have some issues. Note that this list included games that ran fine but were designed with a large screen and mouse in mind, and which may not have been the best experience on a handheld device.
Anyone who bought the Steam Deck in February (or earlier, really, then to get one, then you would have had to pre-order back in 2021) might have been concerned about the size of this list, and the fact that some of the biggest video game series would not play well with their new handhelds.
However, now that we are in early May, things have already improved significantly. There are a number of places where you can track the number of games that can be played on the system, however Boiling Steam has put them in chart form, so that’s what we’re looking at today.
As you can see, things mostly shot up over the course of March and have slowed down since then, but I see this as more of a “how far things have come since launch” kind of deal, not just a study of the last few weeks . At the time of broadcast, there are now 1289 games that are fully verified and a further 1169 that can be played.
Practically speaking, let’s apply these numbers to my own Steam library, as that was how I took an informal look at support when the system was launched. As of February, only 59 of my 810 Steam games were fully verified; now 131 of them are. That’s progress!
Which leads me to: this does not mean that games that are not on the list do not work at all. It just means they have not been fully tested yet, so you can expect this number to continue to rise as more and more results come in. And if you want to keep track of this going forward, Protondb is another great place to bookmark.