Valve shares its plans for non Steam Deck devices
With Valve gearing up to expand the availability of SteamOS beyond its own hardware, initially via the Lenovo Legion Go S, the company has now introduced a new rating system — designed to help folks gauge how well a game will work on any SteamOS device, similarly to what the existing Deck Verified program attempts to do for Steam Deck owners.
This sibling rating system, called SteamOS Compatibility, will sit alongside the existing Steam Deck Verified labels. Steam Deck players will be familiar with the four distinct ratings shown on Steam pages (Verified, Playable, Unsupported, Unknown), but this new badge is a tad simpler: it’ll show whether a game is either SteamOS Compatible or SteamOS Unsupported.
In what’s a rather good sign, Valve has said that over 18,000 games will be marked as SteamOS compatible right out of the gate. This means any device that ends up running SteamOS can then look to this rating system to know what will work.
The checks for this compatibility are done via Valve, so if a game already carries a Steam Deck rating, it should now show a SteamOS one too.
This new system is just another step towards the wider rollout of the SteamOS ecosystem — something that has the potential to really open things up in the handheld space and beyond. Excited to see where Valve takes this.