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Valve just proved you can’t trust its Steam Deck game ratings
(www.pcgamesn.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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Well, it's player based isn't it?
The whole "Playability Theough Proton" rating system is based on player feedback, or at least that's what I thought.
It is my understanding, and I acknowledge that I pull my sources out of my ass, that it is primarily outsourced to player feedback, but VALVe can and does sometimes force a specific rating for highly anticipated or already popular games. I can't tell if that's what happened here because the article seems more focused on smearing VALVe than reporting on what process lead to this happening.
I think we have an answer right there.
The site is garbage blog spam, but I agree that Valve lacks consistency with some of their decision, related to the Deck or Steam at large.
The Steam Deck compatibility ratings (Verified, Playable, Unsupported) on Steam are directly from Valve. They test each game and give it a rating. Some employee probably had to play a lot of Hentai Puzzle games. Sometimes I get asked on the Deck, if the rating is correct, but I don't know if any rating ever changed, because tons of users complained (I didn't even hear of this Spider-Man thing).
ProtonDB ratings (Gold, Silver, Platinum), that you might get through a browser extension, are made through user feedback.
That the Valve ratings can't always be trusted has been known since basically the Steam Deck launch. Some games are Verified, but can barely run, with the lowest settings. This way, Valve can pad some numbers and point to the AAA games that run on the Deck. The opposite doesn't usually happen, maybe games like Ghost of Tsushima, which is mentioned in the article, is rated Unsupported, because of the multiplayer, that doesn't work, but single player is fine.
I honestly thought VALVe ran protondb.com but I can see now at the bottom of the page it says This site has no affiliation with Valve Software.