You just have to know where to look.
One of the convenient things about the Steam Deck is Valve’s handy verification system, which tells you how a game is (ideally) going to run on the handheld PC before you boot it up, and whether you can stick with the default settings or need to do some tweaking. If a game has been tested by the company, it’ll be badged as either Verified, Playable or Unsupported, and while it isn’t a perfect system, it goes a long way to bridging that gap between complicated PC gaming and out-of-the-box console ease. It took a while to arrive, but the very same compatibility details are now starting to pop up for the Steam Machine, albeit bizarrely hidden away.
As spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun, there was a lot of confusion about the newly launched Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced being awarded Steam Machine verification without there actually being any evidence of it on Steam. But that has changed, if you know where to look.
I (very sadly) don’t have a Steam Machine, so I don’t know what happens if you load up the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced store page through SteamOS on the new PC, but I went into the Steam desktop app on my MacBook and found its Steam Machine verification buried inside the Steam Deck compatibility details. If you scroll down to that section (it’s located on the right of the page under the languages section) and click “Learn more,” you’ll see a tab for the Steam Machine next to the Deck’s in the pop-up. Click that and you get the usual three-tick approval found on Verified Steam Deck games.
According to Steam, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced fully supports controllers when played on the Steam Machine, displays controller icons and performs well with the Steam Machine’s default graphics configuration. This means it earns that all-important Verified badge. I also tried searching for a few other games that popped into my head, including Devil May Cry 5 and Cuphead, and they’re also showing up as Verified. In a strange turn of events, Valve’s own Dota 2 is only listed as “Playable” (as it is on Steam Deck) due to pesky mouse and keyboard icons occasionally popping up and the game sometimes requiring you to use an on-screen keyboard to enter text.
Valve is presumably planning to make Steam Machine compatibility more immediately clear in its store eventually, but for now at least, anyone lucky (and deep-pocketed) enough to have snagged a launch unit knows where to look. And if you’re still weighing up whether you want to part with the best part (or considerably more) of $1,000 on Valve’s new living room-friendly gaming PC, Engadget’s review went live this week.
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