Steam Deck FPS data lands on Steam, and Verified looks silly

Valve just did something I’ve wanted since 2022: it stopped asking me to trust a green checkmark and started showing me numbers. Steam Deck FPS data is now live on a big chunk of Steam Store pages, pulled from real players, and it makes the whole “Verified” badge look a little silly.

Here’s the setup. Since February, Valve has been collecting anonymised frame rate data from Steam users who opted in. On Monday evening it flipped the switch and started displaying that data on store pages as averages and histograms, separately for the original Steam Deck and the OLED model. Ars Technica went digging through the results, and some of them are pretty telling.

Steam Deck FPS data vs the Verified badge

The Deck Verified program was always a bit of a blunt instrument. “Verified” meant the game launches, the controls work and the text is readable. It never meant “runs well”. So Cyberpunk 2077 and Skyrim Special Edition wear the exact same badge, while one averages 30 to 40 FPS on the Deck and the other cruises at 50 to 60. Same checkmark, very different afternoon on the couch.

It gets funnier with the “Unsupported” games. Valve slaps that label on titles whose “graphics settings cannot be configured to run well”, or that it’s “still working on”. Except the players disagree. Starfield, Silent Hill 2 and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate all show thoroughly playable numbers from actual Deck owners, and Syndicate gets close to 60 FPS on the OLED. Unsupported, my foot.

Same thing with Watch Dogs 2, which is Unsupported because its multiplayer anti-cheat doesn’t play nice with SteamOS. Fair enough for the online mode. But the single-player campaign? Over 40 FPS average, says the data. For years, people have been buying or skipping games based on a label that was wrong in both directions.

What the numbers don’t tell you

Valve is upfront about the caveats, which I appreciate. VSync and frame rate caps skew the averages downward (if you lock a game at 40, it’ll report 40 even if it could do 55). And the data says nothing about which graphics settings people were using to get there. Someone running Starfield on potato settings at 720p with FSR cranked up counts the same as someone on medium. Valve says the numbers nonetheless “consolidate around relatively narrow ranges”, which is a polite way of saying “most people tweak things the same way”.

Still, I’d take an imperfect histogram from ten thousand real players over a binary badge from a Valve tester any day. It’s also wonderfully blunt: a histogram with a fat bar at 25 FPS tells you everything a marketing page won’t.

What I’d actually do with this: before buying anything for the Deck, scroll past the badge and look at the OLED histogram. If the bulk of it sits above 40, you’re fine. If it’s a sad little hump at 20, wait for a sale or a patch. And for Unsupported games, check the numbers before you believe the warning, especially for single-player stuff. The label is about compatibility; the chart is about fun.

Desktop PCs next?

The obvious question is when the rest of us get this. The Deck is easy: fixed hardware, one config, clean averages. A desktop PC is a snowflake. But back in April, people found strings in the Steam client describing a “Framerate Estimator” that would let you “select an App and a PC config to get a chart of estimated framerates, based on the framerates of other Steam users”. Valve won’t confirm anything beyond being “always looking for new ways to help developers understand the experiences customers are having”, which is corporate for “yes, eventually”.

If that ships, those sketchy “can I run it” websites with forty ad trackers are dead, and good riddance. And with Valve pushing SteamOS onto more machines, including the one I wrote about when Epic confirmed its launcher was coming to SteamOS, a fixed-spec Steam Machine would be the perfect next candidate for the same treatment.

Turns out the best Steam Deck reviewer was the Steam Deck owners all along.