Ahead of the planned December launch, Valve have unveiled their plan to bring clarity on whether specific games will be able to run (and run effectively) on the Steam Deck.
It's an ambitious plan, too: Steam games, of which there are tens of thousands, will be manually reviewed by Valve themselves, and assigned to a category denoting how well they work on the Steam Deck. This reviewing process will focus on four key attributes: input support, native display resolution support (with readable text), general hardware compatibility and compatibility with Proton, including middleware like anti-cheat.
Games that meet all these criteria will find themselves in the 'Verified' category, whereas some will enter the 'Playable' category if they mostly work outside of needing some settings changes on the user's part. The 'Unsupported' category will cover games that aren't sufficiently functional on the Steam Deck, and the final 'Unknown' category will contain games that Valve haven't reviewed yet. When you're browsing Steam on the Steam Deck, games will display a badge marking their category (and thus degree of compatibility), hopefully making it much easier to know which of your collection will perform on the portable PC. Steam's library section will also get a new 'Great on Deck' tab solely containing games with Verified status, and even before the Steam Deck is released, Valve are aiming to let Steam users see which of their games will be compatible on launch.