Valve are expanding the Steam Deck Verified system to cover future SteamOS devices

Steam Deck owners will be familiar with the practice of peering into a new game’s Steam store page and hoping, begging, praying to whatever god is yet to abandon this cruel joke of a reality that it has a little green tick mark on it. This is, of course, the Steam Deck Verified programme, wherein Valve gives good behaviour stickers to games that function fully on their handheld PC.

Soon, this system – so often a source of relief and disappointment – will be expanded, with a view to rating games for compatibility with SteamOS as a whole. As the announcement post explains, that’s because the first non-Steam Deck SteamOS handheld, a new version of the Lenovo Legion Go S, is launching soon, with the possibility of more in the future.

Valve’s compatibility testing staff presumably can’t try out every game on every possible SteamOS device, no matter how many wheeled desks they can roll into the office, as it's an open-source operating system that could feasibly run on any desktop or laptop. But they can, and apparently will, use data gleaned from their existing Steam Deck Verified testing to determine whether a game has or avoids problems with the OS in particular, subsequently rating it as either SteamOS Compatible or SteamOS Unsupported. With a nice blue tick for the former, aww. As with the current system’s Verified/Playable/Unsupported ratings, these will appear on store game pages and in the Steam libraries of anyone playing on a non-Steam Deck SteamOS PC.

"We expect over 18,000 titles on Steam to be marked SteamOS Compatible out of the gate," sayeth the post. While these specific new categories don’t take framerate performance or control input functionality into account, as the Steam Deck ratings do, they should at least let you know if certain games are literal non-starters. Apex Legends seems due a SteamOS Unsupported tag, for instance, after it binned Linux support last year.

I haven’t tried the Legion Go S yet, and our adoptive cousins at Ian Games Network weren’t especially impressed with the Windows edition. But the current state of play among portable PCs definitely has SteamOS above Windows 11 as the more usable, comfortable, lightweight, and stable OS. One that’s surprisinglycapable of runningnon-Steam games, too. As such, I’ll happily get on board with anything that both makes SteamOS patronship slightly easier and might encourage future handheld manufacturers to switch over. Valve expect as much, writing that "the only other officially supported device running SteamOS is Lenovo Legion Go S, but we see this expanding to more devices in the future."

Exciting times, then, if the concept of the Steam Deck has caught your eye but you’d rather wait and see what other hardware makers can do with a baggable form factor and Valve’s own OS. All that being said, one new, lower-spec handheld does not a sea change make, and the recently leaked Asus ROG Ally 2 looks to remain so tied up in Microsoft’s ecosystem that there’s a separate Xbox-branded version of it. Bet it doesn’t have tiny colourful ticks, mind.