When Valve’s Steam Deck launched back in February, it could only certifiably run a (relative) handful of the platform’s 1000s of titles. The exact number was 399, but now, just a few weeks later, that figure has roughly tripled.
On February 25, the day of the Steam Deck’s launch, there were the 399 I just mentioned, plus roughly 300 more that were listed as “playable” but still might have some issues. Note that this list included games that ran fine, but had been designed with a big monitor and mouse in mind, and so maybe weren’t the best experience on a handheld device.
Anyone buying the Steam Deck in February (or earlier, really, since to get one then you would have had to pre-order back in 2021) might have been concerned with the size of that list, and the fact that some of the biggest video game series around weren’t going to be playing nice with their new handheld.
Now that we’re in early May, things have already vastly improved. There are a number of places you can track the numbers of games playable on the system, but Boiling Steam have been putting them in chart form, so that’s what we’re looking at today.
Play Skyrim again and again
If you haven’t played Skyrim at this point in your life, I’m frankly impressed. Bethesda’s RPG classic is difficult to avoid. No matter where you go, it feels like Skyrim is there lurking.
As you can see, things mostly shot up during March and have slowed down since. But I’m looking at this as more of a “how far things have come since launch” kind of deal, not just an examination of the last couple of weeks. At time of posting, there are now 1,289 games that are fully verified, and a further 1,169 that are playable.
In practical terms, let’s apply those figures to my own Steam Library, since that’s how I took an informal look at support back when the system launched. In February, only 59 of my 810 Steam games were fully verified; now 131 of them are. That’s progress!
Which leads me to: this doesn’t mean games not on the list don’t work at all. It just means they haven’t been fully tested yet, so you can expect this number to keep on climbing as more results come in. And if you want to keep track of this stuff, Protondb is another great place to bookmark.
