Steam Deck wants to become the Nintendo Switch of PC video games, the first machine capable of taking mobile and desktop games to a single screen and, for this, Valve wants to take advantage of the huge catalog that they store in their libraries from on September 12, 2003, at which time with the premiere of Half Life 2 Gabe Newell launched their successful digital store worldwide.
What games will NOT work?
It will not be necessary to remember that Steam Deck is a PC, tiny, but a PC after all , with a hardware configuration that seeks to be as compatible as possible, so if you are one of those who have games in your library stored for 19 years, surely doubts assail you to what extent that genius that stole so many hours from you 15 years ago (for example Bioshock ), will continue to work on the new laptop.
To find out, Valve is taking all the time in the world to test , one by one, all the games it has stored on its platform, with the sole intention of knowing how they will behave on the new Steam Deck hardware. Configuration that, remember, is identical in the three models for sale and that only vary in the amount of storage and speed of the solid disk.
So once Valve completes the verification work on all the games, it will place a label on them like the one you can see in the image above, which tells us that the game is “Verified”, and therefore you go to be able to enjoy it without any error; it is “Playable”, so we would still have to make some manual adjustments to make it work beautifully on the machine; “Not compatible”, which reminds us that we will not be able to use it on the laptop ; and finally “Unknown”, which directly means that Valve experts have not yet been able to determine its degree of compatibility with Stream Deck.
What requirements must a game meet for the Steam Deck?
In any case, don’t think that the experts at Valve are satisfied with a game from the Steam library starting on the portable and that’s it. In addition, a whole series of requirements must be met that will mark their belonging to one of those four categories that we have previously described. And those tests that they must pass have to do with four main sections such as control, screen, fluidity and general compatibility with the system.
- For what Steam calls “Input”, it requires that ” the title must be fully gamepad compatible, use the appropriate input icons, and display the on-screen keyboard automatically when needed.” In other words, sticking only to the mouse-keyboard binomial so common in games from 15 or more years ago does not guarantee that we can enjoy it properly.
- For the screen, the game in question must be compatible with the native resolution offered by Steam Deck , which is none other than 1280×800 and 1280×720, and also display the interface and the texts that integrate it in a legible way and, if possible, configurable in size by the user.
- Fluidity is another of the essential elements for Steam, which defines this parameter as that the game “must not show compatibility warnings and, if it has a launcher, it must be able to be operated with the controller”.
- Finally we have something as obvious as it is evident: general compatibility. “If the game is run through Proton, it and all of its middleware must be Proton compatible,” including Steam’s anti-cheat system.