I was wondering recently what the distribution of games validated (i.e. considered as Playable and Verified) for the Steam Deck looked like. Turns out it’s a pretty trivial answer to get, since each appid has a release date (not always the actual release date on Steam, mind you!) that can give us some information about how balanced the Steam Deck line-up is currently. Here’s the answer with a graph:

As you can see, the distribution is largely skewed to the right with 83% of titles released between 2015 and 2022, i.e. rather recent games.

This is not too surprising as:

• Steam gamers are more likely to want to play newer games
• Newer games are more likely to still be supported by developers and incur some changes to make them work well with the Steam Deck.

Additionally, Valve’s verification process includes a measure of popularity as far as I can remember, putting more focus on more recent games making it through the verification process.

This is one data point. Now, it w