When Valve’s Steam Deck launched in February, it was shown to only run a (relatively) handful of the platform’s thousands of titles. The exact number was 399, but now, just a few weeks later, that number has roughly tripled.
On February 25th, the day the Steam deck was released, there were the 399 I just mentioned plus another 300 or so more that were listed as “playable”, but that might have some issues. Note that this list included games that ran well but were designed for a large monitor and mouse, and therefore might not have been the best experience on a handheld device.
Anyone who bought the Steam Deck in February (or actually earlier, because to get one you would have had to pre-order it in 2021) might have been concerned about the size of this list and the fact that Some of the biggest video game series in the world wouldn’t do well with their new handheld.
However, now that we are at the beginning of May, things have already improved significantly. There are a number of places where you can track the number of games playable on the system, however Boiling steam
As you can see, things mostly spiked in March and have slowed since then, but I see this as more of a “how far things have come since launch” sort of and not just an examination of the last few weeks . At the time of publication, 1289 games are now fully verified and another 1169 are playable.
Let’s practically apply these numbers to my own Steam library. because that’s how I had an informal look at support back when the system was started. In February, only 59 of my 810 Steam games were fully verified; now it’s 131. That’s progress!
Which leads me to this: That doesn’t mean games that aren’t on the list won’t work at all. It just means they haven’t been fully tested yet, so expect that number to keep growing as more and more results come in. And if you want to keep an eye on these things in the future, Protondb is another great place to bookmark.