Since its 2022 launch, the Steam Deck has consistently been at or near the top of the company's "top selling products by revenue" charts, with brief dips outside of the top 10 treated as newsworthy events. But sales of the popular handheld gaming PC have apparently been on a steep decline since the system relaunched at a higher price in May.

Linux-focused gaming site Boiling Steam breaks down the historical data, showing how the Deck's chart position has fallen from fifth place immediately after orders resumed in late May down to 14th place for two weeks in early July (the hardware sits at 12th place in the current edition of those charts).

That's in sharp contrast to 2025, when the Steam Deck never dropped below seventh place on the bestseller charts and was only rarely outside the Top 5. Then Valve warned of "intermittent shortages" for the Steam Deck starting in February, leading to weeks of lower chart positions before the Deck became completely unavailable until May.

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About a month ago, Valve announced that it would expand its long-standing Steam Deck Verified program to the now-shipping Steam Machine, offering a separate rating of Steam games' compatibility and playability for the fresh living room-focused hardware. Now that those ratings started appearing on Steam store pages last night (under a "Learn More" link next to Steam Deck Compatibility), we've found that Valve is frustratingly "still learning about" Steam Machine compatibility for dozens of games that the Steam Deck is too weak to run capably.

The Steam Machine compatibility for many Steam games is pretty simple to figure out, of course. If a game is already verified on Steam Deck, it is seemingly guaranteed to be verified on the Steam Machine, as far as we can tell. On the other side, games that have already been confirmed not to work with SteamOS (which can happen for various reasons) obviously won't work on the SteamOS-powered Steam Machine.

The messy middle is where a Steam Machine Verified badge could come in most handy. These are games that Valve has confirmed will load on SteamOS, but which the aging, portable Steam Deck can't handle at the 1200x800, 30 fps standard that Valve requires at default settings (for the Steam Machine, this requirement grows to 1080p and 30 fps). On the Steam Store, these games show up as "Unsupported" on Steam Deck because "the game's graphics settings cannot be configured to run well on Steam Deck" or "this game requires manual configuration of graphics settings to perform well on Steam Deck."

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