Valve's new Steam Machine verification system is silent on these Steam Deck-busters

About a month ago, Valve announced that it would expand its long-standing Steam Deck Verified program to the now-shipping Steam Machine, offering a separate rating of Steam games’ compatibility and playability for the fresh living room-focused hardware. Now that those ratings started appearing on Steam store pages last night (under a “Learn More” link next to Steam Deck Compatibility), we’ve found that Valve is frustratingly “still learning about” Steam Machine compatibility for dozens of games that the Steam Deck is too weak to run capably.

The Steam Machine compatibility for many Steam games is pretty simple to figure out, of course. If a game is already verified on Steam Deck, it is seemingly guaranteed to be verified on the Steam Machine, as far as we can tell. On the other side, games that have already been confirmed not to work with SteamOS (which can happen for various reasons) obviously won’t work on the SteamOS-powered Steam Machine.

The messy middle is where a Steam Machine Verified badge could come in most handy. These are games that Valve has confirmed will load on SteamOS, but which the aging, portable Steam Deck can’t handle at the 1200×800, 30 fps standard that Valve requires at default settings (for the Steam Machine, this requirement grows to 1080p and 30 fps). On the Steam Store, these games show up as “Unsupported” on Steam Deck because “the game’s graphics settings cannot be configured to run well on Steam Deck” or “this game requires manual configuration of graphics settings to perform well on Steam Deck.”

Thus far, every such graphically unsupported Steam Deck game we’ve found on the Steam store is currently listed with an “Unknown” Steam Machine compatibility status. For all of these titles, Valve merely says it is “still learning about” the game and that “we do not currently have further information regarding Steam Machine compatibility.”

That’s a shame, because many of these games that struggle on the Steam Deck can no doubt run just fine on the much more powerful Steam Machine hardware. And new Steam Machine owners will surely want to know whether their fresh living room box can play these games, many of which have appeared on Steam’s Top Sellers list (either currently or in the past).

We were just wondering…

There is some good news for Steam Machine users in last night’s Verification update, though. Games with text that is too small to read on the Steam Deck are perfectly fine when played on a big TV. That means Steam Deck “Playable” games like 007: First Light and Lies of P get bumped up to “Verified” status on the Steam Machine. But games that Valve bumps down to “Playable” on Steam Deck for requiring an on-screen keyboard still get a similar warning on the Steam Machine, so you might want to keep a wireless keyboard nearby on your couch.

We’ve included a list of nearly two dozen games we’ve found that Valve says can run on SteamOS but can’t run well on Steam Deck, and that Valve has yet to test on the Steam Machine. Hopefully they’ll get the helpful up or down Steam Machine rating they deserve soon (a Valve representative was unavailable to immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars).

A (very partial) list of SteamOS-compatible games with “Unknown” Steam Machine compatibility (and “Unsupported” Steam Deck status due to graphical requirements):