Valve is providing more data on Steam Deck performance to developers who have created and shipped games that are marked as Verified on the handheld PC. While this might help devs tune games to run better on the platform, I’m still not sure the Verified system is working as intended.
On April 23, Valve published a new Steamworks Development blog announcing that two new Steam Deck data features were now available for devs. The first is a tool that provides the average framerate over the last 30 days for a dev’s game on Steam Deck. At the moment, this new data is only available to devs with a Steam Deck Verified game, but Valve says the plan is to expand the tool to devs who have Playable-rated Deck games, too.
The other new tool is access to surveys that players can respond to after playing a Steam Deck Verified game for at least 10 minutes. Users are asked if they agree or disagree with a game’s Verified status. If they disagree, they can pick a few reasons why from a list that includes performance and stability. The idea, Valve says, is for devs to use this data to see if recent updates have improved or worsened a game’s Steam Deck experience.
Interestingly, Valve points out that, perhaps in response to criticism of the Verified system, 95 percent of players surveyed agree with the Verified status of games. I find that very interesting, and I’d love to know more about who is disagreeing and if those disagreements mostly stem from a handful of games. We’ve seen some pretty egregious examples of games, like Borderlands 4, which are Verified on Steam Deck, but look and run like garbage. This has become a bit of a problem on Steam with larger games that push the Steam Deck to its limits. I can’t imagine those users agreed with the Verified status of games like Avowed.
Hopefully, these new tools and data will help devs get their games running better on Steam Deck, and as Valve expands its hardware ambitions with the Steam Frame VR set and Steam Machine console, data like this might be very helpful as studios have to balance getting a game to run well across different SteamOS devices.