The true number of playable games is of course much higher, but this is still an impressive milestone.
For comparison: the Nintendo Switch has roughly 4500 games available for it, the PS5 has about 500 games (+ 3500 PS4 games), and the Xbox Series X/S have 400 (+ 3000 Xbox One games).
This number is basically useless except for headlines like this. Actually using my steam deck I don’t care at all about the verification status. There’s plenty of unsupported and unknown stuff that works well, and there’s verified games I’ve run into issues with. Playable is also a particularly bad category because it’s weirdly picky about certain things but not others, and it seems to be rarely updated when games get patches, so stuff can get better or worse than it’s labeled. I just check ProtonDB or look up youtube videos of someone playing a game on deck if I want to check something.
I grabbed Dead Space because it was verified and within twenty minutes it became pretty obvious I wasn’t going to be able to play at an acceptable standard.