In a crowded office in India, Rajesh sat at his desk, eyes half-closed from exhaustion. He worked in Valve support, and his current task was verifying games for Steam Deck compatibility. It was a tedious job, but he had to meet his quota. Quantity over quality. Today, he was reviewing a game called Skald.

He launched the game on a Steam Deck emulator, saw it boot up, and clicked around for a minute. It opened. It didn’t crash. That was enough. Rajesh quickly assigned it the prestigious "Steam Deck Verified" badge, not bothering to test further. After all, he had more games to check, and time was running out.

Meanwhile, the creators of Skald were thrilled. Their game now had the badge! They wasted no time boasting about it online, promoting Skald as fully compatible with Steam Deck. But in reality, players soon discovered it barely worked - with terrible controller support.