Valve will soon let you know if a game is compatible with your SteamOS device

Ahead of the release of the Lenovo Legion Go S running SteamOS later this month, Valve has announced a new compatibility rating system for SteamOS devices. As the name implies, the new SteamOS Compatibility system will rate how compatible games are with third-party devices, similar to how Valve already rates the compatibility of games for its own Steam Deck.

The new rating will only show up on devices running SteamOS that aren’t a Steam Deck and are designed to quickly indicate to users if all of a game’s features and functionality, including any anti-cheat tools it may be using, are fully supported by the OS. Games will be marked as either “SteamOS Compatible” or “SteamOS Unsupported” in the Steam Store and Steam Client.

The rating “does not include testing results for performance and input, since we will not know (and have not tested) how all titles will run on all potential hardware,” as Valve points out in an announcement shared to its community pages yesterday. But the company expects “over 18,000 titles on Steam to be marked SteamOS compatible out of the gate.”

Because the new ratings are “automatically generated from Steam Deck verification results without additional testing,” Valve says that developers don’t need to take any additional steps to ensure their games are compatible with third-party SteamOS devices. “If your title already has a Steam Deck Compatibility rating, an automated process will use that data to give it a SteamOS Compatibility rating.”

The Legion Go S will be the first handheld gaming PC to trade Windows for SteamOS, the gaming-focused operating system that powers Valve’s Steam Deck.