A few days ago, we reported on Valve's Steam Deck compatibility progress, noting how the list went from just 120 games to over 240 titles in under a week. But now, that number pales in comparison with what we have today. Valve has managed to bring that number to a whopping 520 titles in just a few days -- as reported by GamingOnLinux.
More specifically, Valve split the number into two categories: the list of Verified games amounts to 309 games, while the number of Playable games takes up the remaining count at 211. If you are unaware, this is part of Valve's new "Deck Verified" program that features four categories for game compatibility, Verified, Playable, Unsupported, and Unknown.
The Steam Deck now has 309 titles fully supported on the console as natively designed. The additional 211 Playable titles might require some user tweaking to get the game running, but it still means the games will run on the new handheld console.
But, despite having 520 titles now operational on the Steam Deck, none of those games are in Steam's top 10 or even top 20 list of most popular games played on the Steam library. God of War, the only exception, ranks 18th place in Steam's hierarchy.
Arguably this is not great for the Steam Deck since Steam's top 10 to 20 most popular games hold a large majority of gamers using Steam right now. Getting early support for these titles would give more mainstream gamers a considerable incentive to purchase the Steam Deck.
But, we presume Valve is not taking this lightly. We already know a large blocker to games support are issues related to anti-cheat software. If you look on ProtonDB's website, it appears most games running anti-cheat software have significant difficulties running on Linux operating systems, with only a few titles getting Gold status (meaning the game runs almost perfectly).
Since the Steam Deck uses Valve's homebrewed version of Linux called SteamOS, all ProtonDB's limitations will apply to the console.
The good news is that companies such as Epic, with its Easy Anti-Cheat software, have already added support for the Steam Deck and Linux, which is excellent news. But as far as we're aware, not all anti-cheat software companies have prioritized Linux support right now, which will make games not running Easy Anti-Cheat difficult to implement onto the Deck.
Either way, Valve is getting more and more games supported on the Steam Deck in record time. With this level of pace, we should start seeing more popular games in the Steam Library running on the Steam Deck soon.
