Valve says Steam Machine will have “fewer constraints” than Steam Deck for game verification

PC giant Valve has said that developers will have “fewer constraints” when it comes to platform verification than the Steam Deck.

Speaking to Game Developer, designer Lawrence Yang said that studios that are waiting for the ‘Steam Machine Verified’ scheme can expect to have a bit more freedom than they have had with the company’s handheld.

“One easy rule of thumb is that if your title is Verified on Steam Deck, it will be Verified on Steam Machine,” the Valve staffer added.

On the Steam Frame virtual reality headset side of things, Yang said that there might be a different verification process; he said that Valve will “be going through the same rounds of testing and providing developer feedback” to make sure it gets the initiative right.

Ahead of the release of the Steam Deck, Valve rolled out the Steam Deck Verified scheme, which gave consumers details about how a particular game runs on the hardware. The scheme is broken down into several categories: verified, playable and unsupported.

The first means it works without any issues on Steam Deck, while the second column is for games that can run, but might have some issues. Unsupported games are not playable for a number of reasons.

Valve announced three new items of hardware in November. The Steam Machine is a mini PC, while the Steam Frame is a virtual reality headset. Finally, the Steam Controller is Valve’s second attempt at a gamepad.

There are no release dates or price points for any of these products just yet.

Speaking on the Friends Per Second podcast following the Steam Machine reveal, Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said that the hardware doesn’t have a price internally at the company, but said that it was looking to offer a “good deal”.

“I think that if you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” he said.

“Ideally, we’d be pretty competitive with that and have a pretty good deal, but we’re working on refining that as we speak, and right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is going to be because there’s a lot of different things that are fluctuating.”