It’s time! As you know based on our previous analysis, every month and a half or a bit more (in this case over two months) there’s a 1000 new games added to the list of Verified and Playable games on the Steam Deck. This time we reach the new threshold of 9000 games. (8978 at the time of writing, but close enough)
- Verified: 3260 games (36 %)
- Playable: 5718 games (64%)
Here’s a quick overview of what the trends looks like since the launch of the Steam Deck:
Trend since the Steam Deck launch
As you can see the progression is steady and completely predictable now. The problem, if I may say so, is that there’s about 300 new games released on Steam every week, roughly 1200 every month give or take, and the current pace of the verification process is too slow to ever expect to fill the gap. Of course, what matters is the verification of non-garbage games, as Steam has a lot, and I mean a lot, of shovelware. I can’t tell you how many games I remove every single week when I review the latest Linux native clients released that are just asset re-use, low-effort puzzle games, and low quality porn games. That’s probably 30% of all games released at least in the recent past. In any case, the gap would still remain. And therefore, Valve and their partners have decided to focus on priorities.
Less Verified Titles?
It seems like the ratio of verified titles is dropping a little, according to the latest few weeks:
Not a huge difference, but would be nice to see the trend reverse at some point – you could expect that to happen the day devs start to count on the Steam Deck for achieving their sales targets, so it might take a while as there are still few Decks out there.
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Games Validated by Year
Here’s what the chart looks like if we take the latest data and arrange it by year.
As you can see there is clearly a peak of verification for the years 2021 and 2022. You might say “this is expected, because that’s what the general trends of games released on Steam looks like”. And you would be half-right. Half, because indeed 2021 and 2022 were peaks also for all games released on Steam, but half-wrong because there’s not such a big gap between 2020 and 2021.
So in effect, we see Valve and their partners betting on verifying very recent games before anything else (at least, at much higher speed). This does make a lot of sense if you are focused on driving sales, because newer games are the ones that sell the most (Marketing 101: New beats everything else, including quality – the best movie from 20 years ago will never get as much audience as the latest turd from Hollywood released today) and it makes sense that Valve is trying to optimize for sales rather than 10 years old library compatibility.
Also, recent games are more likely to receive updates, and if they are rated as “Playable”, it gives the developer more opportunity to take in account how the game feels on the Steam Deck and improve text size, performance and more.
Recent Good Games?
Now that we are done with the graphs for now, let’s look at cool recent games that became Verified or Playable recently:
- Cassette Beasts (made with Godot!)
- Time Wasters
- The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure
- The Legend of Heroes: Kuro no Kiseki
- Company of Heroes 3
- Resident Evil 4 (pretty much working since Day 1)
- DREDGE (reviewed here)
- Mr. Saitou
- Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
- Crab Champions
- Sifu
- Terraformers
- Age of Wonders 4
- Minecraft Legends
- ROBOTICS;NOTES DaSH
- MORDHAU
And many others…
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Would be nice to know if “unverified” is decreasing over time. I suspect it is, but in theory if a lot of new releases are unverified it’s possible it’s not happening. Also, would be nice to see the *rate* it is decreasing via the graph. Thank you!
“Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective”
wow i didnt expected that and definitelly missed it relasing!
it wont be the same playing it with mouse than with the stylus+touch, but its good to see nevertheless.
i just hope the downgrade in experecience dont tint too much negativity in the brand, that people realize it would be better to play in the correct form factor and we get the oportunity to have this kind of game in this kind of form factor in the future
Ghost Trick is a great game. I had a ton of fun with it on the DS. On the Steam Deck you may still be able to use touch, too…
I still feel Proton is sort of a… dishonest solution. I know, sounds harsh; but I much preferred more native ports.
Maybe Valve could have done something like “we’ll only take a 5% take on Linux sales” and invest in Feral Interactive.
5% more profit of 1% of sales would be too small of an incentive for gamedevs to care. It’s virtually nothing and does not justify any effort at all.
Native ports have lost for now, it’s great when we can have them, but don’t expect gamedevs to create any – Feral interactive has moved on to mobile devices in the meantime, because they were also way too slow to make ports. Nobody wants to play a game 2 years after its released.
It would be 5% cut versus 30%, under the right circumstances it could be a reasonable incentive.
As to Feral, according to Wikipedia they have 50-100 devs, imagine what they could do with double or triple that.
Steam machine and controller were a failure, whichever way you look at it. I don’t put much faith in Steam deck either.
Even if you removed Valves margin for Linux ports it would not change a thing. Making a port is time for the dev that is better spent on improving their own game on a single platform. 80/20 rule at work.
If you add more devs at Feral they will do 5 ports a year instead of 2 which is nowhere near enough to meet the demands.
Valve sponsporing Wine and proton related projects habe brought thousands of games to Linux in a few years which is something that Feral would never have pulled off