There are two ratings attached to most PC games on a Steam Deck, they use different words, they are written by different people, and they disagree often enough that treating one as the other will eventually cost you an evening.
The two labels
Steam Deck Verified is Valve's. Valve runs the game against its own checklist — does it launch, is the text readable at the Deck's size, does it work with the controller without a keyboard, does it need a configuration change — and awards Verified, Playable, Unsupported or Unknown.
Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Borked are ProtonDB's. Nobody at Valve writes them. They are aggregated from reports filed by players who actually ran the game through Proton, on their own hardware, with their own Proton version.
The second is what our Steam Deck pages show, and every one of those pages says so on it.
What each tier actually claims
- Platinum — runs perfectly out of the box, with no tweaks reported.
- Gold — runs perfectly once some tweaks are applied.
- Silver — runs with minor problems, and is generally playable.
- Bronze — runs, but crashes or has problems serious enough to interrupt play.
- Borked — either will not start, or is unplayable.
The gap between Platinum and Gold is worth pausing on. Gold does not mean "nearly perfect". It means somebody had to change something — a launch option, a Proton version, a config file — and once they had, it ran. If you want to install and play without reading anything first, Platinum is the tier that promises that and Gold is the one that does not.
Four examples, read today
Every figure here was read off our own pages on 12 September 2026, and each of those ratings had itself been collected from ProtonDB two days earlier, on 10 September. Both dates matter, which is rather the point of this article:
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Platinum, from 1,744 reports.
- Valheim — Platinum, from 323 reports.
- Cyberpunk 2077 — Gold, from 2,706 reports.
- Elden Ring — Gold, from 2,096 reports.
Two things are worth noticing. The first is that the report count is not decoration: a Platinum built on 323 reports and a Gold built on 2,706 are different kinds of claim, and the smaller number deserves more caution. The second is that both Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring are trending Platinum — meaning the most recent reports are landing a tier above the overall rating — which is what a game looks like while it is being fixed.
The date is part of the rating
A Proton compatibility tier is a snapshot, not a property of the game. Proton is updated, games are patched, and a title that was Bronze eighteen months ago can be Gold now without anyone announcing it. This is why every Steam Deck page here prints the date the rating was read, in the answer paragraph and again in the table.
If you are reading a rating anywhere — here or elsewhere — and it does not tell you when it was collected, you are reading an assertion rather than a measurement.
Two more rows on our pages, and what they are for
Trending recently is where the newest reports are landing. It moves before the overall rating does, so it is the early sign that a patch has helped or hurt.
Best anyone managed is the highest tier any single player reached — usually after changing the Proton version or adding launch options. It tells you what is possible if you are willing to fiddle. It does not tell you what to expect on a fresh install, and reading it as though it does is the most common way to be disappointed.
So which should you trust?
Both, for different questions. Valve's badge answers "will this behave like a console game on this handheld" — controller, text size, no surprises. ProtonDB answers "did it actually run for people like me, and how recently".
A game can be rated Gold by hundreds of players and carry no Valve badge at all, simply because Valve has not got to it. The reverse happens too. Neither is a substitute for the other, and no page on this site will tell you otherwise.
Compatibility data on our Steam Deck pages comes from ProtonDB, used under the Open Database License, and each page links back to the game's own ProtonDB entry so you can check the reports yourself.
