Majority of the best PC games now work well on Steam Deck
Over half of the top 100 titles on Steam play nice with the Deck
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Steam Deckcompatibility continues to improve, and over half the games in the top 100 most popular titles onSteamnow play nice with Valve’s handheldgaming PC.
To be precise, these are the games which are either Steam Deck ‘Verified’ – tested and judged as fully functional right off the bat – or ‘Playable’, which means they’re more or less there, but might require a bit of manual tweaking for the best results.
Boiling Steamcombed through the top 100 games onSteam(going by the average number of concurrent players in the past two weeks) to find that 54 of those fell into the above categories of working well or perfectly with the Steam Deck. In other words, the majority – just – of those big hitter games are good to go with the portable gaming machine.
To break it down, 28 of the games have achieved fully Verified status, and that includes the likes ofElden Ring, No Man’s Sky,Apex Legends, ARK: Survival Evolved, Sekiro and Valheim, to pluck out some of the higher-ranking performers. And 26 are Playable including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (and Source), Team Fortress 2, Dota 2,GTAV and Skyrim.
Analysis: Valve is building momentum nicely
There’s something else to bear in mind here, namely that of the remaining 46 games that fall outside of the Verified and Playable categories, a good chunk haven’t been tested – while 26 titles are marked as Unsupported, the other 20 are still yet to have been run through their compatibility paces.
This means that they may well be perfectly playable, and indeed some of them are likely to be. If we guess that approaching half of them could be okay with the Steam Deck, then the true percentage of games that work well with the handheld might be creeping up towards the two-third mark (and surely it’s over 60%).
When you consider this, and that Valve recently announced in a blog post last week that the total number of Verified and Playable games has exceeded 2,000, this represents pretty good progress. With the companynotingthat: “We’re going to continue charging through the Steam catalog.”
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Indeed, if you recall, a month previous,Valve announced hitting 1,000 games, so the firm has doubled up and added another 1,000 since then.
Of course, Valve isn’t just focused on pushing forward with verification and compatibility of games, but also tweaking the Steam Deck OS to add useful features as time progresses – like the recent ability to cap frame rates at 15 fps if needed. Why’s that important? Well, for games like puzzlers where it doesn’t make any odds to limit frame rates to a low level, you get better battery life on the go.
Finally, want to know our opinion concerning the top titles for the Deck? Well, we’ve pulled out the highlights of thebest Steam Deck gamesthat will cause jaws to drop in our experience, with some surprise indie hits in there alongside the gorgeous graphics of the likes ofGod of War.
ViaPC Gamer
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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