Valve drops the 1440p requirement from Steam Frame’s Playable rating

Valve has taken the resolution floor out of one of the Steam Frame’s compatibility badges. The release notes for SteamOS 0.3.0, the headset’s first system update, carry a single developer-facing line: “Change Playable performance criteria to allow any resolution (was: 1440p)”.

Valve’s own guide to streaming over the wireless adapter. The compatibility badges do not cover games streamed from a PC. Image: Valve

Playable is the middle rung of the ladder Steam shows next to every game on the Frame. Valve defines it as a game that “functions on Frame, but may require manual work from the user”, with a community controller config or an in-game settings tweak as the examples.

The same update sped up charging and fixed a garbled microphone, but this line is aimed at developers rather than owners.

What each badge promises

Valve runs the Frame programme as an extension of Steam Deck Verified, and the ratings work the same way. A Verified game “passes all compatibility checks”, an Unsupported game “does not function on Frame due to incompatibility with Proton or specific hardware components”, and Unknown means the review has not happened.

The bar for Verified is the concrete one. Valve’s Steamworks checklist says a VR title “must run at a minimum of 72 fps at 1728×1728 during normal play”, and a 2D title at 30 fps at 1280×720. Valve adds that most failures in that section leave a game with a Playable badge instead.

Valve has never published a framerate for Playable, and the release note is the only place it has tied a resolution to that badge. With the figure gone from the note, what is left in public is the description of the work a player has to do.

The checklist still lists a 1440×1440 cut-off

Checked on September 21, the same Steamworks page still states that “VR games below 1440×1440 will appear with an Unsupported badge”. Valve has not published a note explaining how that sits with the change in the release notes, and has given no before-and-after count of how many titles move rung.

The two lines sit side by side without a reconciliation. The release note describes the Playable criteria; the checklist ties a VR game below 1440×1440 to Unsupported, and Valve has not said which one a review follows now. Everything else on the checklist, from controller models to the on-screen keyboard, reads the same either way.

The badges only cover standalone play

One limit is easy to miss on a store page. Valve says the review “only applies for games (both 2D and VR) running locally on Steam Frame, not games running on a PC streamed to Frame”, so a title marked Unsupported can still run perfectly well over Steam Link from a gaming PC.

The badge also has no gatekeeping power. Valve says the results “will not affect whether your game is available to customers on Frame, but will affect how it is presented”, which makes the rating a presentation layer rather than a store filter.

Counting the effect is the hard part. Steam listed 143 Steam Frame Verified games on September 18, and Valve publishes no equivalent figure for Playable, so the size of the shift will only show up as store pages are retested.

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