Valve Is Misleading Millions Of Steam Deck Users With Strange Rating

Through the decades, Valve has earned the respect of PC gamers by simply being transparent, fair, and doing right by its customers. But there are times when even the things you love aren’t above criticism, and Valve’s latest decision to mark GTA V Enhanced as “Playable” on Steam Deck is a baffling move that certainly warrants some of that criticism.

As spotted by Gaming On Linux, Valve has assigned Rockstar’s upgraded version of Grand Theft Auto V (the previous version has been delisted) a Deck Verified rating of “Playable.”

Here’s the full definition of what constitutes a “Playable” game on Steam Deck, in Valve’s words: “The game may require some manual tweaking by the user to play. E.g. requiring user to manually select a community controller config, needing to use the touchscreen to navigate a launcher, etc.”

Another popular game that is labeled “Playable” on Steam Deck is Marvel Rivals. That game earns the designation because it has some text that might be too small to read, and because you may need to occasionally call up the onscreen keyboard manually to type in text. Those are very minor inconveniences.

GTA V on Steam Deck has a rather massive inconvenience: the entirety of GTA Online is unplayable. Late last year, Rockstar Games added BattlEye anti-cheat to the game, and decided against supporting Linux. (BattlEye is fully supported on Linux, and it’s up to the developers to implement it.)

To this day, Rockstar’s GTA Online FAQ says the following about Linux and Steam Deck: “Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online. You will be able to play GTAV Story Mode but unable to play GTA Online […]

GTAV and GTA Online are not officially supported on Steam Deck and all technical support questions should be directed to Valve’s Steam Deck support content and community.”

(I take issue with Rockstar’s phrasing here, implying that Steam Deck does not support BattlEye, when in fact the developer is not supporting Steam Deck, but I digress.)

The point is straightforward: Valve says GTA V Enhanced is compatible with Steam Deck, meaning that all gameplay is accessible. GTA Online, however, is undeniably huge part of this package, but it’s not playable. There are no workarounds. There are no tweaks. The only possible way for it to be playable is if Rockstar someday decides to support the console, and by extension Linux.

So why is the game not labeled as “Unsupported?” I don’t know. I believe this move is misleading to Valve’s massive community of gamers, and that this decision further erodes some of the trust Valve has earned. It definitely serves to further bolster the need to revamp Valve’s Deck Verified program.

I reached out to Valve for a response prior to writing this article, but the PR team is at the Game Developer’s Conference this week and responses will likely be delayed. I’ll post an update here as soon I hear back.

In the meantime, please be aware that you can’t actually enjoy GTA V Enhanced on Steam Deck, unless all you’re interested in is the story mode.