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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who doesn't use Steam and Steam Deck, what's the difference between "playable" and "verified"? I.e. what kind of bugs or unsupported features am I likely to encounter when I play one vs the other?

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Cannot speak for Steam Deck, but now in July '23, pretty much all games work with Proton out of the box, (with between -10% and 15% performance loss) unless the game maker purposefully made the game unplayable on Linux (some AAA titles anti cheats for example).

And then, as a Linux user, you can just return any game you like, past the return window, by marking 'doesn't work on my system ' in the return wizard.

Sad thing that often the games that have the 15% performance hit are the ones most demanding of your hardware. It's also wierd playing some games on Linux, because clicking both left and right mouse button causes a middle click.

There's usually some description of why a game is marked playable, I think by clicking on the yellow symbol you'll get the lost of reasons.

The most common reasons are requires using the on-screen keyboard and small fonts. Some playable games are completely fine: Occasionally I find a game that only requires using the keyboard once or twice but is still marked 'playable'.

The difference is not huge. The big one is that, to be "Verified", there are some usability criteria that need to be met (the game's text needs to be legible on the Steam Deck screen, you need to be able to launch the game without any hacky tweaks like clicking around in a launcher using the touch-screen or something, the game needs to basically work out-of-the-box with the Steam Deck's sticks and buttons, etc) and if those aren't met then they will provide a 'blurb' which explains which ones are missing.

Other than that, I have found that lots of games which aren't "Verified" play perfectly, and some games which are "Verified" don't launch at all (because Valve said 'hey! it works!', gave it the Verified badge, and then a month later the developers pushed out an update for the game which broke something for Steam Deck users).

Playable most of the time means "this game requires a keyboard, so remember to press Steam+X for the on-screen keyboard when you're asked to enter your character name", or "fonts are a bit small on the small screen", or "there's no built-in performance preset, so you'll have to set it to medium manually".

Essentially, complete non-issues most of the time.

It honestly varies by game, but in my experience "Playable" is usually a great to okay experience but has small text, a launcher you need to use a touch screen for, or maybe only partial controller support.

Game breaking bugs are rare in playable titles from what I've seen.

The majority of games I play on SD are "only" playable and it's still a great experience.

It varies quite a bit, and there are some items that are pretty minor that will cause a game to not be officially verified. For example, some of the 2D Final Fantasy games run very well without any issues on the Steam Deck, but are only listed as playable because they require the use of the on-screen keyboard to enter in character names.

Not all the time, but sometimes, it's as simple as the game having a dialogue or launcher that is awkward to control on the touchscreen - but the game runs fine.

Forza Horizon 4 is Playable rather than Verified because of the Xbox Live sign in window at the start, but after that goes away it's flawless.

Verified Just Works.

Playable usually means some text is too small or you need to enable the SteamOS virtual keyboard for some bits.

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