How to get your game Steam Deck Verified, from 2,143 Valve ratings

Valve has rated only 37% of the 5,860 indie games we checked for Steam Deck. Of the ones it rated Playable, a third missed Verified on a single test, usually button prompts or small text.

If your game is already out and you want the green badge, this is how a released game gets tested, what Valve checks, and what kept games like yours at Playable.

Most indie games on Steam have never been rated

We took every paid indie game that launched on Steam from 2020 to 2022 and drew at least 10 Steam-purchase reviews in its first year, 5,860 games. On September 24, 2026, we read the Deck compatibility report each one shows on its store page.

63% are still Unknown. Valve’s definition: the game “has not completed the compatibility review process.” Nobody has tested it.

Whether a game was tested tracks almost exactly with how many people played it. Among games with 10 to 99 reviews in year one, 80% are unrated. Among games with 1,000 or more, 2% are.

1. 10 to 99 reviews (4,209 games)79.9%
2. 100 to 299 (776)34.9%
3. 300 to 999 (474)15.8%
4. 1,000 or more (401)2.0%

Paid indie games launched on Steam 2020 to 2022 with 10+ Steam-purchase reviews in year one. Share whose Steam Deck compatibility is Unknown. Reports read September 24, 2026.

Source: Strike Two analysis of Steam store data

That follows from how Valve fills its queue. A game gets in one of three ways: an automated heuristic picks it, Valve decides it matters to Deck owners, or the developer requests a review from the Technical Tools section in Steamworks.

The third door isn’t open to everyone. Valve’s documentation says of manual requests, “This is not available to all partners.” For released games it adds that it is “prioritizing the games most played by owners of Steam hardware.”

So if your game is small and you can’t see the request link, your game may simply not have come up yet. That isn’t a verdict on the game.

Half of rated games are Playable, usually over glyphs or small text

2,143 of the games have a rating. 36% are Verified, 52% Playable and 11% Unsupported. The larger the game, the more often it was Verified: 33% of rated games with 10 to 99 first-year reviews, 48% with 1,000 or more.

Games that credit a separate publisher were rated more often (52% against 30%) and Verified about twice as often (21% of all such games, against 10%).

Verified means the game passes every check on Valve’s list. In short:

• Controls. The default controller configuration reaches all content, with no settings to change first.
• Button prompts. On-screen glyphs match the controller in use, and keyboard prompts don’t appear when a controller is active.
• Text entry. Naming a character or a save opens the on-screen keyboard, or has its own controller-friendly entry.
• Text size. No interface text smaller than 9 pixels tall at 1280x800.
• Performance. The default settings run at 30fps at 800p.
• Seamlessness. No “unsupported hardware” warnings, and any launcher works with a controller.

Most failures leave a game at Playable. Unsupported is for games that don’t run properly at all. The badge matters on the device itself: Valve says the first tab of the Steam store on a Deck “shows only games that are great on Steam Deck.”

Of the 1,119 Playable games, 68% were flagged for button prompts that don’t match the Deck. 52% had text too small to read. A third had an incomplete default controller setup, and a third didn’t bring up the keyboard for text entry. Performance was flagged for under 4%.

1. Controller glyphs don't match67.6%
2. Text too small to read52.3%
3. Default controls incomplete33.8%
4. No on-screen keyboard for text31.5%
5. Native resolution not the default13.6%
6. Default settings not performant3.8%
7. Launcher problems2.7%

Share of Playable games with each warning in Valve's compatibility report. A game can have several. Paid indie games launched on Steam 2020 to 2022 with 10+ reviews in year one. Read September 24, 2026.

Source: Strike Two analysis of Steam store data

403 of the 1,119 (36%) had exactly one warning. For 176 of those it was the glyphs, and for 120 the text size. 34 needed the on-screen keyboard and 31 needed 1280x800 as the default resolution.

90% of Playable games were held back only by input, text or resolution. None of those is a Proton problem or a hardware limit. They’re the kind of thing a developer who knows the code can fix in an update.

We say that with some sympathy. If you built a game for a keyboard and a monitor, glyph swapping and 9-pixel text were never on your list. They’re on Valve’s now.

Unsupported is rarely something you can patch

245 games are Unsupported. 22% of those are VR games, which Valve doesn’t support on the Deck. Another 9% failed on graphics performance. Two were blocked by anti-cheat.

The other 68% carry only a general result: SteamOS does not support the game. Valve says Unsupported almost always means middleware the Deck doesn’t support, such as some anti-cheat or video codecs, or Windows features Proton doesn’t cover yet. When Proton catches up, Valve says it will “automatically notify you and re-test.”

If your game is Unsupported, read the report in Steamworks. It usually names the specific failure and a bug number. Swapping a video codec is a real fix. Waiting on Proton is not one you control.

Deck players are a small slice of your reviews

For the 1,651 of these games with 100 or more first-year reviews, we read their 100 most recent Steam reviews. Steam flags a review when the player was playing mostly on a Steam Deck.

For the median Verified game, 3 of those 100 came from Deck players. For Playable games, 1. For Unsupported and unrated games, usually none.

Verified games also held on to more activity. Compared with Playable games of the same size from the same launch year, their last 12 months of reviews came to a median 18.8% of their first year, against 15.8%. Among games with 10 to 99 first-year reviews there was no difference at all, 17.2% for both.

That’s a correlation, not proof that the badge did it. Games that pass Valve’s checks were likely built with controllers in mind, and those differ from mouse-driven games in many ways.

When chasing Verified is the wrong move

• If your game is built around a mouse or a keyboard, a full controller scheme can mean redesigning the interface. For a few percent of your reviewers, that may cost more than it returns.
• If you’re VR or rely on unsupported anti-cheat, nothing in your code will change the rating. Say so plainly on your store page and spend the time elsewhere.
• If you can’t ship an update, there’s no path. Valve re-tests a new build, not a promise.
• If you’re already Playable with several warnings, list them and cost them before starting. A game with four warnings is a different project from one with a single glyph fix.

The counter-argument is Steam Machine. Valve says “any game that is Verified on Steam Deck is guaranteed to be Verified on Steam Machine as well.” Only 17% of the Deck-Playable games here are Verified on Steam Machine today, so the same fixes can earn two badges.

What to do next with a game that’s already out

1. Check your status. Your store page shows the Deck rating. In Steamworks, the compatibility results list every test by name.
2. If you’re Unknown, look for “Steam Hardware Compatibility Review” under Technical Tools on your app’s landing page. If the link isn’t there, Valve says it will reach released games as it goes.
3. If you’re Playable, fix the warnings in order of cost. Valve recommends the Steam Input API for glyphs. Raise the smallest text to 9 pixels at 1280x800, and call Steam’s on-screen keyboard wherever players type.
4. Ship the build, then ask for a re-test. Valve’s documentation says to submit a support ticket for a re-review of an updated game. If you’re still inside the week before new results auto-publish, a new build delays publication and gets re-tested.
5. Announce it. Post an event about Deck support and paste its link into the Steam Hardware Compat Info field on your store page. A Deck update is also a good reason to spend a Steam update visibility round.

Deck support is one of several things you can still do for a game that’s already out, alongside the languages you add and the updates you post. Strike Two partners on games that are already built, so read this knowing where it comes from.

How we measured it

The games are the 5,860 paid titles under Steam’s Indie tag that launched from January 2020 to December 2022 and drew 10 or more Steam-purchase reviews in their first year. They are the same population as our study of quiet launches and our study of what publishers do.

For each game we read the Steam Deck compatibility report the store page uses, on September 24, 2026: its rating and every test result. Every rating matched the store records we read two days earlier, and twelve random games re-read afterwards matched exactly.

Recent activity is each game’s Steam-purchase reviews from September 2025 to August 2026, as a share of its first-year reviews. Each Verified game is compared with Playable games launched the same year whose first-year reviews were within 15% of its own.

For the 1,651 games with 100 or more first-year reviews, we read the 100 most recent Steam-purchase reviews and counted those Steam flags as written by a player mostly on a Steam Deck. We kept only the counts.

The limits: ratings are today’s, and the report has no test date. Valve chooses which released games to test, so rated and unrated games differ before any rating. The review flag misses Deck owners who mostly play on a desktop. And none of this measures what getting Verified would do for your game.