Why You Can’t Trust Steam Deck Verified Labels and What to Do About It

Valve’s Deck Verified program aims to curate a game catalog for Steam Deck owners, but the program isn’t perfect. Some verified games run poorly, while other unsupported games work great. Here’s what you can do about it.

“Deck Verified” Labels Aren’t to Be Trusted

The Deck Verified program has four compatibility categories.

The Verified category states that “The game works great on Steam Deck, right out of the box,” the catch is that Valve doesn’t actually review game performance on the Deck. As you can see below, none of the four categories a game has to fulfill to receive the Deck Verified badge includes overall performance.

The only performance-related statement is “good default settings,” which doesn’t say much about actual in-game performance.

This has led to a number of games being slapped with the Verified label even though they run with less than ideal performance on the Steam Deck, even at low settings and with AMD’s FSR upscaling tech enabled.

For example, one of the more infamous Deck Verified titles that struggle on the Deck is Mortal Kombat 1, which can drop to below 40fps on more demanding stages. This is far from ideal for a fighting game.

Even after you set everything to low, you’ll struggle to hit a locked 60fps, with uneven frame times and stuttering galore. Now, if MK1 were a casual game, a turn-based RPG, or generally a game where smooth performance isn’t that important, I could understand it getting the Verified laberl. But a fighting game with unstable performance shouldn’t be labeled as Verified in my opinion, it should be labeled as Playable instead.

Then we have Fallout 4, which received an update a few months ago that caused the game to receive the Verified label. The issue here is that the update completely broke the game for many Steam Deck owners. It also removed the launcher, making it impossible to tweak visual settings.

Shortly after that, Bethesda issued a patch that made the game playable again, but the overall performance is still worse compared to when the game wasn’t Deck Verified. Again, I think dropping Fallout 4 to Playable would be a better solution than listing it as Verified.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is another example of a Deck Verified game that doesn’t work great on Steam Deck right out of the box. During the first two acts of the game, you’re faced with frequent stuttering and frame drops. Once you reach Act III, the game turns into a stuttery mess, no matter what settings you use.

Once again, Valve should either replace the game’s Verified badge with Playable or introduce another, fifth Steam Deck compatible category. Something like Verified with Playable Performance or similar, which it could award to games that meet minimum performance standards on Deck.

Finally we have God of War, a game that suffers from a memory leak bug that always ends with a hard crash, sooner or later. There’s a solution to the issue, though. You can either manually increase the page file size, practically increasing the amount of memory your Deck has access to, or install CryoUtilities, a community app that improves overall Steam Deck game stability. Alternatively, you can constantly monitor in-game performance and exit the game before it crashes.

While these tweaks can make the game stable, they are extra steps you have to perform to make the game run without issues. The game doesn’t work great out of the box. Yet again, a Playable badge would work much better in this instance.

Don’t get me wrong, many Verified games do perform rather well on the Deck. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that a game featuring the Deck Verified badge doesn’t mean it runs great and without issues. You shouldn’t base your purchasing decision solely on whether a game is Deck Verified or not.

Steam Deck Unsupported Games Can Run Great on Deck

On the other hand, a game being labeled Unsupported or sporting the Unknown badge doesn’t mean it won’t work on your Deck.

For example, the very first game I played on my Deck, Codemasters’ Race Driver: GRID from 2008, ran beautifully out of the box with max settings and x4 antialiasing. I can say the same for Colin McRae: Dirt 2, Dirt 3, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Out of the newer games that carry the Unknown or Unsupported labels, Dirt Rally 2.0 ran perfectly on my Deck even though it bears the Unsupported badge.

Other Steam Deck owners have also been playing officially unsupported games without issues. This includes titles like Sunset Overdrive, Guild Wars 2, Batman: Arkham Origins, Just Cause 2, Ys Origin, Watch Dogs 2, Watch Dogs: Legion, and many others.

In other words, a good deal of games sporting the Unsupported and Unknown badges do, in fact, run without issues or require a few manual tweaks to work well, similar to the tweaks needed to make some Verified games run smoothly and without problems.

If a game’s labeled as Unsupported or Unknown, there’s a good chance it will work great on your Deck without issues out of the box or after a few tweaks. This is more proof that you shouldn’t blindly trust Steam Deck Verified labels.

What Can You Do About This?

My advice is to use ProtonDB instead of Deck Verified. ProtonDB is a website that provides crowdsourced Linux and Steam Deck game compatibility reports, and, from my experience, it’s much more reliable than the Steam Deck Verified program.

Each game in ProtonDB’s database includes a separate Steam Deck compatibility section where Steam Deck owners from around the world submit feedback on compatibility and performance.

You can find out whether a game works and how well it runs, but also how to remedy common issues. I started using ProtonDB soon after getting my Deck, and I find the site’s crowdsourced reports to be a much better source of info than the Deck Verified badges.

That said, read all reviews instead of just skimming through the top few because lots of users report playable performance in certain games that not everyone would consider playable. Check the Baldur’s Gate III ProtonDB page to see what I’m talking about.

You can also watch YouTube Steam Deck performance videos. The site’s full of them, and they often include optimal settings to get playable performance as well as potential fixes for known issues. Just type the name of the game you’re interested in and add “Steam Deck” or “Steam Deck Performance” to the query.

There’s also Reddit, especially the Steam Deck subreddit. Do note that many Steam Deck owners are oddly defensive about the machine and often downvote people who mention a game’s poor performance or (falsely) claim that a game works great, even if the opposite is true.

This behavior was widespread with Baldur’s Gate III, which was touted as a “great experience on the Deck” by a good portion of the Steam Deck subreddit community, even though the game is anything but a perfect experience, especially during the final act.

If you decide to scour through the Steam Deck subreddit for performance and compatibility reports, read all the comments in a thread, not just the most upvoted ones. Also, make sure to read threads that don’t have many upvotes but a lot of comments.

Finally, Steam has a 2-hour refund period, which you should take advantage of. If you aren’t sure whether a game will work fine on your Deck, buy it directly on Steam, test it out for a while (just ensure you stay below the 2-hour window), and refund it if you’re unsatisfied with the overall experience.

It’s great that Valve has the Deck Verified program, but it isn’t the be-all-end-all for Steam Deck game compatibility. The program has its flaws and it doesn’t include performance reports. However, there are several alternative ways you can and should use to check how well a game runs on Steam Deck.

I advise using alternatives like ProtonDB and looking at Deck Verified badges only as a general indication of how a game might work on your Deck, not as an infallible source of information.