Over the past several months, criticism of Valve's Deck Verified program has been growing. The rating system that was designed to show what games do and don't work on Steam Deck has started to show some holes, as games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle ship with Verified badges despite performance issues on the Steam Deck. Valve is updating the system in the wake of devices like the Legion Go S that will support SteamOS, but it still isn't addressing the core issues with the Deck Verified system.

Steam Deck Verified will now show SteamOS compatibility

A useful extra, but the program still needs work

Revealed through a Steam developer blog, Valve says it will show a new SteamOS compatibility rating for games. Unlike the Deck Verified program, there are only two buckets of support. Either a game is unsupported by SteamOS or it's compatible. Valve says this change is to provide more details for "any hardware running SteamOS that's not a Steam Deck." It's basically a check to make sure the game and all of its middleware work with SteamOS and Proton. The new verification doesn't say anything about controller support, performance, or any of the checks that are supposed to be part of the Deck Verified program.

Valve says updates will be automated, and it expects "over 18,000 titles on Steam to be marked SteamOS compatible out of the gate." Instead of manually retesting games, Valve says it'll use any Deck Verified data to determine if a game supports SteamOS or not. And, moving forward, it says both SteamOS compatibility and Deck Verified badges will be processed simultaneously.

It's a great move as SteamOS adoption picks up. There are shipping devices like the Legion Go S that will come with SteamOS, but Valve has opened up the floodgates on its Linux-based OS. You can install it on any device you want now, even if the experience isn't as seamless as what you get on the Steam Deck. There are also forks of the open-source OS like Bazzite that are built to support handhelds like the ROG Ally X.

Unfortunately, the new program doesn't address the issues with the Deck Verified program. New games are continually running up against the boundaries of the Steam Deck's hardware, and although Valve hasn't officially changed the program, it's become increasingly clear that a Verified badge doesn't necessarily mean you'll have a great experience. If nothing else, this update shows that Valve is looking at the Deck Verified program and trying to make it more useful, so hopefully we see an update to the core verification process soon.