Valve stress again that there'll be more Steam Machine Verified games than Steam Deck ones, with "fewer constraints" in their testing programme

Regardless of whether you’ve laid hands on the plastic contours of a Steam Deck, you’ve probably seen the Steam Deck Verified programme in action: badges of honour (or of ‘Unsupported’ disgrace) on a game’s Steam store page, reflecting how well it runs and plays on the portable PC per Valve’s in-house testing. The programme is being expanded to include the upcoming Steam Machine too, and is set to bestow a lot more games with Steam Machine Verified status, given what a Valve designer calls “fewer restraints” in their judging criteria.

Lawrence Yang – who’s worked on the new Machine, the Deck, and the also-incoming Steam Frame – told Game Developer that it’ll be easier for a game to achieve a coveted green checkmark sticker with its SteamOS mini-PC, and that Valve will “be going through the same rounds of testing and providing developer feedback” for its new verification checks as the Steam Deck’s. Even if, especially in the case of the Frame VR headset, different requisites will apply. This follows a Valve blog post that put things in simpler terms: if a game is Steam Deck Verified, it’ll be Steam Machine Verified too.

Rather than a lowering of standards, for the Steam Machine specifically, it’s pretty obvious that “lifting constraints” simply reflects differences in the hardware’s power and use cases versus the handheld Steam Deck. Yang didn’t specify details, but it’s easy to guess which criteria from the Deck Verified programme weren’t as urgently applicable: for instance, some only score a ‘Playable’ badge instead of full Verified status because they include small text that’s harder to read on the 7in, 800p screen. The Steam Machine intends to hook up to TVs and desktop monitors, so that’s probably not worth including in the new device’s rulebook.

Considering the shared use of SteamOS, other touchstones will definitely remain, like whether a game can display the correct gamepad button glyphs (Valve would very much like you to play the Steam Machine with their revamped Steam Controller) or whether it needs occasional keyboard input. Valve will be testing for performance too, though since the Steam Machine is significantly beefier in the graphical muscles than the Deck, it’d naturally win more Playable and Verified statuses here anyway.

This is all good news for players and developers alike – the former get more at-a-glance transparency on which games in their library will work, and the latter (as Game Developer points out) a handy marketing tool. It’s a shame, then, that the Steam Deck itself has become mired in uncertainty since its reveal late last year, the ongoing component shortages and price rises raising questions around the Gabecube’s affordability and lack of a concrete release date beyond “early 2026”.