ask: steam deck verification

Mark asked:

Hi Joe! We recently released our game on Steam and we’re having trouble getting Steam Deck verified. We’ve around the same number of Steam reviews and so I wanted to ask and see what steps you took to get over this hurdle as the game should at minimum hit Yellow verification, which would be massive for us. Thanks for your time.

So the short answer is I don’t think I even faced the hurdle you’re talking about. What happened for me is that as soon as Steam Deck Compatibility became a thing, this button materialised on my Steamworks App Admin screen:

I recently found out this doesn’t happen for everyone.

Apparently, some people are just not getting this, and they’re not having any luck talking to Valve about it. I don’t know why this would happen, but my best guess would be some sloppily-implemented hedge against malware getting verified, similarly to how InFlux Redux mysteriously has its “profile features limited” because Steam is “still gathering information” which obviously it isn’t, or it would not limit my profile features.

Attributes that my Steam partner account has that yours might not: I’ve had it (and games shipped on it) for over 10 years, its lifetime gross revenue is over 100k, they have sent me development hardware before (so presumably I was given some form of OK by someone somewhere at some point), the appID precedes Steam Direct fees. These are just ideas, and might have nothing to do with why I magically have Steam Deck Compatibility Review access and not everyone does. It could also just be a bug. Who knows? There’s no way to know!

Anyway, once I did have this, the review process was pretty straightforward, and they took about a week to come back to me with their next demands each round. A few of these rounds were “some of your text is still too small by one pixel”, but more serious issues included “when you plug in a controller and unplug it the Steam Deck built-in controller stops working” and “if you plug in multiple controllers all input should be routed to all of them if it’s a single player game because the Steam Deck is a controller so if you plug one in you actually have plugged two in”. These were not too massive of a hassle, but I can go deeper on those (in a UE5 context) if you want, as well as the perf stuff.

Tl;dr: sorry, I have no idea! You could always email Gabe. For years it was his policy to silently forward things to whoever he thought could help, and the last time that worked for me was only like 5 years ago, I think.