Every game verified and playable on Steam Deck (Feb 2023)

Valve’s Steam Deck is actually coming out on the 25th of February, bringing with it the entire Steam library with some caveats. As the Steam Deck will be running a fork of Manjaro, called SteamOS, which is a distro of Linux, you can start to piece together why there are some caveats. 

Valve has been hellbent on supporting the operating system for the longest time, with a move to UNIX based systems seen back when they finally launched on macOS, which sees familiarity with Linux. However, native Linux support didn’t come until much later with the release of their ‘Steam Machines’, dedicated boxes that manufacturers shipped for a short time to try and consolify the PC market and make it more approachable. 

This didn’t stick and it was mainly down to expensive machines, with limited games to run without doing some heavy leaps to get there. Linux might be a system within every single developer, but it is by far and away the least friendly for those that want to game. 

What is Proton?

Valve, not one to back down in the name of progress, canned the Steam Machines and began to work on building Proton. This intermediary layer between the Linux OS and Steam game means that there’s little need to ‘port’ the game over natively and allow Valve’s software to handle the heavy lifting. It’s how they’ve managed to get 100 games ‘Verified’ according to both the official Proton website and a custom, a fan-made list that is using Steam DB. 

Proton already supports over 18K games and is being constantly updated by the community and developers. We even recommended five games or series to try out based on these Proton results. 

Valve is still working on their official compatibility list, but as it has now been scraped via their Steam API and placed on a website, it seems like it is close to nearly 100 games. 

Here is the Proton list of Steam Deck Verified games from the ProtonDB, which is curated by the community and also uses Steam’s API:

These games are sourced from the fan list that scraped SteamDB for the information and is split between “Verified” and “Playable”, as well unsupported, but this appears to be dedicated to VR games like Half-Life Alyx.

You might notice some major discrepancies between the Proton list and this second list – set up by Avery and SteamDB– as this is pulled from Steam’s API, rather than the manually selected list: