Steam Frame verification program confirmed, as fresh Steam Machine details land online

One of the defining aspects about Valve’s venerable gaming handheld is the Steam Deck Verified program, an initiative that lets prospective players know how good of an experience to expect when loading up a game to play.

There are multiple tiers to this: Verified, Playable and Unsupported. There is a number of criteria that a game has to meet in order to get Verified or receive a Playable rating, namely: Does it run at a minimum of 30FPS, support controllers and have text that is readable on the Deck’s small display?

This is fairly trivial then for a large number of games, especially anything from the PS4 generation and before, save for when games become a little too retro and clunky. This low barrier of entry will carry over to the Steam Machine verification program, as revealed by Valve engineer Lawrence Yang in an interview with Game Developer, with Yang stating that "if your title is Verified on Steam Deck, it will be Verified on Steam Machine", with developers facing "fewer constraints".

Perhaps then it should come as no surprise that Valve will implement a similar verification program for its upcoming virtual reality headset, the Steam Frame, as Yang reveals in the same interview, but the nuances of targeting such a platform are much different from those of what is essentially a low-powered PC with controllers stuck to it.

Namely, the Steam Frame uses a mobile-based Snapdragon SoC (System on a Chip), much like those found in mobile phones, or its closest competitor, the Meta Quest 3, and allows players to play games on the device, without the need to stream from a PC or Steam machine.

This is important to note because the Snapdragon SoC is an ARM-based processor, which uses a completely different instruction set when running programs compared to more traditional x86 processors found in PCs and consoles, such as those made by Intel and AMD.

For those in Apple land, you may remember that when the company transitioned to Apple Silicon processors, starting with the M1, Apple implemented a program called Rosetta 2, an emulation layer, that allowed applications which had been developed with x86 in mind to run on the new machines before the developers could bring out a native version.

Valve, of course, is no stranger to emulation layers, with Proton making it so that Windows-based games and programs can run on Linux. However, the Steam Deck uses an x86-based AMD processor, making this a far easier task to do.

No fear, however, for Valve has already announced the FEX translation layer, which operates very similarly to Rosetta 2, but the process of doing this is far more demanding, with the operation requiring 10-20% of the CPU's power to do so, and this must be taken into consideration when determining whether or not the Steam Frame has the grunt to run a non-ARM based program.

So, how will the Steam Frame verification program work?

Getting back to games, players can expect to play two different kinds: stereoscopic 3D VR games and flat-screen games projected onto a virtual display.

There are already many native ARM-based VR games that have been developed with the Meta Quest in mind, and many of these will likely get ported over with ease, but there are many that will have been developed to run on x86-based Windows machines.

During the press preview, Valve showed VR titles such as Moss and Ghost Town running on the Steam Frame, which indicates the level of experience we can expect.

As for games with flatscreens in mind, these will also have to be limited to titles that can perform well enough natively on the Steam Frame. During the event, Valve had Hades 2 running.

What's more, with Valve making inroads into the ARM world, we could theoretically see mobile games come to Steam. It's not out of the realm of possibility that Valve could expand the Steam storefront to mobile devices, as an alternative to Google Play or the App Store.

With all this in mind, this means the Steam Frame verification program has to take into consideration many kinds of scenarios:

• ARM-native VR games
• x86-based VR games
• ARM-native flatscreen games
• X86-based flatscreen games

How much of this will be communicated to the end-user is unclear, but fellow Valve engineer Steve Cardinali told Game Developer that the company seeks a "It just works" philosophy when it comes to its hardware, so we may very well just find out if a game is Steam Frame verified or not in a similar fashion as with the Steam Deck.

For those who got a Steam Deck when it first launched, you may remember that the verification program was a bit slow to start, and wasn’t entirely without controversy either, with seemingly verified titles not running well at all.

Verifying lower-end VR titles may end up being a lot easier, simply due to the virtue that there are far fewer of them released to date and have been shown to run on similarly powerful headsets, whereas, when playing flatscreen games on a virtual screen, the Steam Frame has to contend with many tens of thousands of games on Steam.

Will Valve simply put out an “At your own peril” warning for these games, or will they figure out some way of automating the process by skimming system requirements?

No doubt, we will find out in due course, as Valve hopes to get the Steam Frame out in "early 2026" along with the Steam Machine, though it all may be moot if users end up not being able to stomach the Steam Frame and Steam Machine price, that is, as Valve may have to charge more than expected owing to the ongoing RAM pricing crisis.

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