How to Filter Steam Deck's 20K+ Games by FPS, Price, HLTB

How to Filter Steam Deck's Verified Library by FPS, Price, and Completion Time

Valve's Deck Verified program has spent years building out compatibility data for the Steam catalog, and per Valve's own Deck Verified catalog, that list now runs well past 20,000 titles. That scale is the problem as much as the solution: knowing a game runs on Steam Deck doesn't tell you whether it hits a comfortable frame rate at your preferred battery-life settings, whether it's worth the asking price this week, or whether you actually have the hours HowLongToBeat says it takes to finish. A DIY approach to solving this — stitching together Deck Verified status, live pricing, and HowLongToBeat runtime data into one filterable list — has circulated in r/SteamDeck threads as a workaround for a gap none of Valve's official tools close on their own.

This piece covers why the existing tools each solve only part of the problem, what a combined FPS/price/HLTB filter needs to pull together, and how to build a version of it yourself.

Why Existing Steam Deck Filters Fall Short

Three tools cover most of what Steam Deck owners currently use to vet a purchase, and each is missing a piece:

None of them answer the actual question a shopper has: of the games rated Verified, which ones run well, cost little, and fit the time available this month? That's a three-way filter — performance, price, and playtime — and it doesn't exist as a single first-party feature in Steam's own UI.

What a Combined FPS + Price + HLTB Filter Actually Requires

Building this kind of list means merging three data sources that were never designed to talk to each other:

1. Deck Verified / compatibility status — pulled from Valve's public Deck Verified pages, to establish the base eligible list.
2. Price data — from Steam's own storefront pages or an aggregator like IsThereAnyDeal, refreshed regularly since Steam sales move fast.
3. Completion-time estimates — from HowLongToBeat's community-sourced database, to filter by "Main Story," "Main + Extras," or "Completionist" hours.

None of these publish a combined FPS number as part of their core dataset — actual frame rate is the hardest piece to source cleanly, because it depends on in-game settings, resolution, and whether Valve's FSR-based scaling is enabled. Community spreadsheets that attempt this generally lean on self-reported frame-rate checks from Deck owners plus per-title performance writeups, like the kind covered in SpecPicks' Steam Deck performance breakdown of LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. Worth flagging up front: Steam Deck runs on a fixed, custom AMD APU — an RDNA 2-based integrated GPU paired with a Zen 2 CPU — not a swappable desktop card. Any performance data attached to a Deck filter tool should come from Deck-specific testing, not from discrete-GPU benchmark charts for cards like an RX 6600 XT or RX 6700 XT, which run in entirely different systems and aren't representative of Deck hardware.

Building Your Own Filtered List: A Step-by-Step Approach

There's no single official Valve feature that runs all three filters at once, so the practical path is a manual or lightly-scripted one.

Step 1 — Start from the Verified list. Reference Valve's Deck Verified catalog as your base pool. This is the eligibility gate; anything below "Playable" gets excluded before you look at anything else.

Step 2 — Layer in price data. Cross-reference against a price tracker — Steam's own storefront pages or IsThereAnyDeal — and set a ceiling. "Under $10," "under $20," or "currently discounted" are the filters that show up most often in community threads.

Step 3 — Filter by HowLongToBeat runtime. Decide what playtime band matters — a short weekend game versus a long RPG — and cross-reference titles against HowLongToBeat's "Main Story" and "Main + Extras" columns.

Step 4 — Sanity-check performance last. Because FPS data isn't part of any of the three source datasets natively, treat it as a manual verification step. Check a per-title Deck performance writeup or a recent community benchmark thread before finalizing a pick, rather than trusting an aggregate performance percentage that isn't sourced to a specific game, resolution, and settings profile.

Where the Underlying Data Comes From

Why This Matters Beyond One Reddit Thread

The appeal of a combined filter isn't novelty — it's that Steam Deck owners increasingly buy in bulk during Steam sales, and the existing storefront UI doesn't help triage a wishlist against real constraints like a commute-length play session or a tight budget. It's the same instinct behind community fixes for other Deck friction points: threads working through why a Steam Deck randomly wakes from sleep, owners building 6TB one-cable dock setups to store a library at this scale locally, or people reviving custom Steam Controller configs tied to the original Big Picture Mode — all examples of the Deck's owner base building tooling Valve hasn't shipped natively.

It also reflects how differently people use the hardware day to day. Some of that 20,000-plus Verified catalog gets filtered for non-gaming use cases entirely, and even owners who've had hardware fail and gone through the replace-or-upgrade decision tend to voice the same complaint: too many options, not enough structured way to narrow them down by the three things that actually matter for a purchase decision — will it run well, does it cost too much, and is there time to actually play it.

Citations and sources

• Steam Deck Verified — Valve
• ProtonDB
• SteamDB
• HowLongToBeat
• IsThereAnyDeal
• r/SteamDeck

This piece is editorial synthesis based on publicly available information. No independent first-party benchmarking is reported.