Valve’s Steam Deck now has over 2000 “verified” and “playable” games

Valve has announced that the Steam Deck now has over 2000 “verified” and “playable” games on it.

A post on the Steam Blog begins with the announcement that over 2000 games have been marked in the “verified” or “playable” categories for the Steam Deck. These two tags indicate that games are either wholly supported by the Steam Deck (verified), or are playable but not be perfectly optimised (playable) for the handheld PC.

To get “verified” for Steam Deck, games have to meet a strict set of criteria created by Valve. The games that don’t meet the criteria may work fine on the handheld, but suffer from problems like small text that is difficult to read or input issues that can be tricky on the system.

The post also details some of the improvements made to the Steam Deck after release. Valve mentioned the on-screen keyboard, saying: “Since launch we’ve improved the on-screen keyboard experience as well. Dual trackpad typing is now available, the game mode keyboard is now available in Desktop mode, and we’ve even added a bunch of new keyboard themes so you can pick whatever suits your typing mood.”

Tips for improving the Steam Deck’s battery life on games that are less demanding were also included: “Finding ways to improve battery life for Steam Deck is always high on our list. We find that depending on what you’re doing, you can expect between two and eight hours of gameplay, but if you want to optimise for battery life even further there are additional options.

“In the past month we added the ability to reduce your framerate all the way down to 15 FPS (this setting works great for visual novels, puzzles and a lot of simulation games). And for those who love to tinker, we’ve made TDP (processor power), GPU Clock control, and FSR (screen scaling) settings available to optimise power even further.”

In other news, Wordle has revealed what the best starting word is for the game.