Planning for Steam Deck Verification
Generally speaking, Steam Deck verification is something you do pretty late-ish in a game’s development.
However, if you don’t make some specific decisions early on, you may end up in a situation where it’s very difficult (or practically impossible) to retro-fit your game to fulfill all Steam Deck verification requirements.
So! I thought I’d write about some of these things.
(As always, don’t take my word for it – read the official documentation and do your own further research)
1. Text size
The Steam Deck screen resolution is 1280x800 and text should be at least about 12 pixels high.
As you can imagine, trying to “make all text bigger” late in development can potentially be very messy.
I suggest establishing some reasonable standard font sizes early in development.
My caveman way of testing this:
- Play your game in 1280x800 resolution.
- Take a screenshot.
- Count how many pixels tall your text is.
2. Button glyphs
When playing on the Steam Deck, button prompts/controls should only show the Steam Deck button glyphs.
Here’s screenshots of Skin Deep with Steam Deck button glyphs:
Squeezing in these button glyphs (and removing/hiding any keyboard prompts) at a late stage can be painful. Similar to adjusting text size, making huge changes to UI can cause all sorts of unpredictable knock-on effects.
If possible, setting up infrastructure early on to accommodate swapping in different button prompts (keyboard, gamepad, etc) is one way to handle this.
Prompt images
To the best of my knowledge there isn’t an “official” set of button glyphs. However there are a ton of button image packs that include the Steam Deck glyphs.
A couple examples:
Kenney Input Prompts | Xelu’s Free Controllers & Keyboard Prompts
Note: the official documentation recommends SteamInput API integration. I personally haven’t used SteamInput API in my projects – I’m sure it works fine, but just wanted to give a data point that it’s not explicitly required.
Deck check
In the Steam API, the bool IsSteamRunningOnSteamDeck(); function will tell you whether the game is currently running on a Steam Deck. This is one way to determine whether you should/shouldn’t draw the Steam Deck button glyphs.
EDIT 2-19-2026: a commenter mentioned you may want additional logic to handle a docked Steam Deck. Example: if the Steam Deck is docked and you’re using an Xbox controller, you’d instead display Xbox button glyphs.
3. The Whole Dang Game Needs Gamepad Support
The whole dang game needs to be playable with the Steam Deck’s controls. All the gameplay, menus, typing, the whole shebang…
Good luck! 👋
The Good News
If your game already has gamepad support, then you’re good. Your controls will just naturally work fine with the Steam Deck.
The Surprisingly Still Good News
If your game is only keyboard/mouse with no gamepad support, you may be in luck?
The Steam Deck’s control mapping system is robust. Your mileage may vary, but in my experience it does a good job at allowing you to remap your controls onto the Steam Deck’s sticks/buttons/triggers/touchpads:
As the developer, you’re then able to use the Steamworks site to assign an “official” control scheme.
Et al
So, caveat: you don’t need to be Steam Deck verified. It is a non-trivial amount of work, and does take time/budget to get all of this working well.
Which leads me to my confession… I’ve mostly been playing on the Steam Deck lately, so selfishly I just want more Deck-friendly games on the Steam Deck. Haha. Yup. I want games. It’s true.
Fortunately, if your game is made with gamepad in mind, there’s a good chance it will just naturally work well on the Steam Deck – with the exception of the text size requirement, which anecdotally seems to trip up a fair amount of titles. Please, I beseech you… make font bigger 🙏