Valve unveiled the Steam Deck back in July, which the company calls a handheld gaming PC. And while it is indeed one, it is likely that it won’t have the kind of performance to match the gaming PC you gave sitting at home. As such, the company is also working on giving it a separate rating system to determine if a game is playable on it.
Valve is in the process or reviewing the entire Steam library of games to give them one of four ratings. These are Verified, Playable, Unsupported and Unknown. Verified and Unsupported should speak for themselves. Playable, by Valve’s definition, means that while a game is playable on the Steam Deck, it will need some manual adjustment by the user. Unknown, on the other hand, just means that the game has not been checked yet.
Valve also says that a game’s rating can be changed over time, simply due to updates to either the game or the Steam Deck software. For the most part, this should be unlikely. But as we all probably have experience to some degree, software works in mysterious ways. When browsing games on the handheld, there rating will be displayed on the top right corner of a game’s Steam store page.
Depending on your disposition, you could consider this either a nice extra touch, or something that’s downright essential. And it’s definitely a tough job for those at Valve who are working on reviewing the games for this rating. But For us, whether or not this is a big deal still hinges on the Steam Deck actually being available here.
