Valve wants your feedback on its "verified" games process
And it promises it's not "crowdsourcing the compatibility testing process".
Valve is seeking your feedback about your experiences with "verified" Steam games thus far on Steam Deck.
The lucky souls who managed to snag an early Steam Deck pre-order have had their units for a few weeks now, and consequently, Valve would like to know how they're finding it, particularly if you're playing games that have been marked as "verified" - that is, games that had been tested and deemed to run smoothly and without glitches or bugs.
"The initial data we're gathering in this way is about titles that are Steam Deck Verified," Valve explains. "We're able to collect objective data (crashes, etc.) to help us understand how well the technical side of our review process is working, but ultimately the Deck compatibility ratings are about the overall experience: the definition of 'working well' is succeeding at enabling current and future Deck customers to find the experiences they want.
"We want to make sure we're doing that, or identify the titles for which your experiences don't match your expectations."
It's an opt-in feature - and you can opt-out any time, apparently - and Valve promises it's not "crowdsourcing the compatibility testing process". Instead, it's "checking in with the crowd to confirm whether the process [it's] built is enabling the experiences we all want it to".
To participate, hit "yes" when asked by your system if it's okay for Valve to "occasionally" ask you for feedback.
It's been a long wait, but Steam Deck is now out in the wild. For those (like me) that didn't make the head of the queue when reservations opened last July, however, Valve recently had some promising news, saying production of its new portable gaming PC will be "in the hundreds of thousands" by April.
Valve designer Lawrence Yang recently explained the company expects production to "ramp very quickly" as it continues "surmounting" the initial supply chain issues that led to Steam Deck's delay last year.
If you missed our impressions of a few of the demos in the most recent Steam Next Fest, you can view them all in our 2022 Next Fest archive. The next Next Fest will run in June.