Valve Teases Robust Steam Machine Verified Game Library On Day One

Valve Teases Robust Steam Machine Verified Game Library on Day One

Last updated: 2026/01/16 at 3:21 AM

News Room Published 16 January 2026

Gamers who buy Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine will find it has a much larger library of Verified games on day one than the Steam Deck did, since Valve will place “fewer constraints” on game developers seeking Verified status.

Thanks to its powerful hardware and more traditional controller options, getting games to a comfortably playable standard on the Steam Machine will be much easier, and that means more Verified badge games right from the start, Valve tells Game Developer.

When the Steam Deck launched in early 2022, it had several hundred Verified games and a few hundred more that were considered playable. Today, that total is well over 20,000 and continues to increase, but Steam Machine verification could catch up almost immediately.

“One easy rule of thumb is that if your title is Verified on Steam Deck, it will be Verified on Steam Machine,” says Valve designer Lawrence Yang. That suggests that at the very least, Steam Machines should have thousands of verified games on day one.

(Credit: Valve)

Part of that is down to the Steam Deck and Steam Machine sharing the SteamOS operating system, so if a game works on one, it should work on the other. The Steam Machine’s hardware is also several orders of magnitude more powerful than the Steam Deck, and it supports easy mouse and keyboard control, so many games will be more playable with that kind of input, opening the door to a more expansive library of Verified games.

For gamers who want a console-like, easy-to-use experience, Valve’s Steam Machine may well offer something unique in the PC gaming space. By booting quickly, straight into a game-launch window rather than a desktop environment, it can act like the pure gaming machine many people want from their gaming PC.

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Its controller is designed to aid in that experience, too. With the wireless receiver puck separated from potential obstructions and digital interference by a lengthy cable, its responsiveness should be excellent. And by doubling as a charger, it could make the Steam Machine gamepad experience at least as good, if not better than gaming with an Xbox controller on Windows.

Eventual pricing could be a concern, though, as the rumored price is $950 for the 512GB model and $1,070 for the 2TB one.