It’s been a while since we last checked the state of the Steam Deck compatibility among the top 100 games currently played on Steam. This is a list that changes a little on a daily basis, but it’s relatively stable (the most played games typically remain played for a fairly long time, especially at the top) so it’s a good indicator on how things progress or stagnate over time.

This ranking was established on Nov 12th Japan morning time, which is basically US evening time on Saturday 11th of November 2023.

So what do we end up with?

In the following categories, it looks like the following (you can assume the numbers are percentages since we are in the top 100):

If you count Steam Deck Verified and Playable categories together, we get 66% overall, which is better than where Valve was before in April 2022 (where the state of the compatibility was at 54% at the time). One year and a half later, this is somewhat expected as they had more time to go through more games. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the most popular game from 2023 that has a Steam Deck Verified rating, for example.

If we look at that metric by the release date of all titles included in the Top 100 (by removing any group with sample size less than 10) we find that the largest gap in the recent games compatibility comes from games in 2022 and 2023 so far. Games from 2021 and 2020 have a much better coverage for compatibility.

Valve and their partners have been actively working on reducing the gap in Steam Deck compatibility ratings by focusing on validating games from 2022 and 2023 first, as described in our analysis back in July 2023, while also validating high profile games even before their release, like for Persona 5 Tactica recently.

Among the games not currently supported in 2023, we find:

• Cities: Skylines II: you should not expect that one to work on the Steam Deck, UI wise and performance wise…
• EA SPORTS FC™ 24: apparently problems with EA Anti-cheat, and “Wine not supported”
• Starfield: kind of works, but is too demanding for the device as mentioned on Ars.
• Sons Of The Forest: yet another example of a game where the performance on the Steam Deck is sub-par.

And there are three games for which the rating is pending:

• ARK: Survival Ascended
• Football Manager 2024
• Risk of Rain Returns

as they were only released fairly recently. I would expect Football Manager to be hardly playable on the Steam Deck, for UI reasons as well. So overall, it looks like Anti-Cheat and the recent performance requirements of more recent games is going to put a stop on some people’s ambitions when it comes to what they want to play on the Steam Deck.

For Cities Skylines II though, it’s not even just a Steam Deck problem, it runs like shit everywhere.

Full Table

At that point in time, here is the following ranking for the Top 100, along with their current Steam Deck verification status updated at the same time as the data was picked up.

We’ll have a look again in a few months, probably, or earlier if needed.