Of the 100 most played games on Steam, 76 are either verified or playable on the Steam deck (opens in new tab), a milestone that at least shows that developers are enthusiastic about Valve's portable gaming PC. This Linux gaming blog Boiling Steam (opens in new tab) first noticed that of the 97 games in the top 100, 73 of them, removing Wallpaper Engine, Soundpad, and Source SDK Base 2007, were Steam Deck or had been verified as playable. And Squad (open in new tab), Slay the Spire (open in new tab), and Brotato were all playable on the deck without issue. Or maybe 19 out of 25, or 38 out of 50." Either way, these games were rated either "Verified," meaning that Valve thinks they work perfectly, or they were not, as the on-screen keyboard for entering text, the interface's Playable, meaning it works with one or two caveats, such as the on-screen keyboard for entering text and poor scaling of the interface.

But the big exception is rather large: the 21 top 100 games that don't work on Steam Deck are mostly old, well-known, and heavily played games that involve massive anti-cheat software that doesn't exist on Linux. These are games like "PUBG," "Destiny 2," "Rainbow Six Siege," and the Steam hit "Rust," not to mention MMOs like "Black Desert. Making anti-cheat work is just a technical liability that developers have no interest in finding the time to fix.

Still, as the platform grows and more people become interested, more hardware optimizations will become available; we know that Steam Deck 2 won't happen anytime soon (opens in new tab), and even Valve is working on ray tracing (open in new tab) and investing time in things like volumetric effects. It is also increasingly likely that future games from these major developers will consider prioritizing support for the Deck operating system.

In any case, this was essentially the conclusion of last month's Steam Deck news, which included a really nice game data transfer feature (opens in new tab) and Steam Deck's first sale (opens in new tab). We also finally got around to properly compiling a list of Steam Deck's best accessories, including Katie's heartbreaking tale of how upgrading Steam Deck's SSD was much harder than it needed to be (opens in new tab).