I was wondering recently what the distribution of games validated (i.e. considered as Playable and Verified) for the Steam Deck looked like. Turns out it’s a pretty trivial answer to get, since each appid has a release date (not always the actual release date on Steam, mind you!) that can give us some information about how balanced the Steam Deck line-up is currently. Here’s the answer with a graph:

As you can see, the distribution is largely skewed to the right with 83% of titles released between 2015 and 2022, i.e. rather recent games. This is not too surprising as:

• Steam gamers are more likely to want to play newer games
• Newer games are more likely to still be supported by developers and incur some changes to make them work well with the Steam Deck.

Additionally, Valve’s verification process includes a measure of popularity as far as I can remember, putting more focus on more recent games making it through the verification process.

This is one data point. Now, it will be insightful to see how this distribution changes in the next few months. Are we going to get even more skewed to recent titles? Are we slowly going to see some slightly older titles trickling down in the verification process?