It is much higher. Those are just the officially approved numbers. You can get a lot more games than that working though. Most will probably run out of the box anyway, or with just slight tinkering, assuming the performance of the Deck suffices of course. You may have to create custom control mappings though.
Slight tinkering and slight annoyances. Like some text is hard to read or unreadable, button/key prompts are wrong. Frame limiting being wonky, sound glitches. But all in all still amazing to be able to play your stuff on the go.
Some aren’t even that egregious. A game having a launcher, or requiring you to manually bring up the keyboard, for example, keeps it from being verified.
So Monster Hunter Rise, a game that works flawlessly, launched as “playable” because it required you to manually evoke the keyboard when typing your name in character creation.
Yeah, a few examples from my own Deck include Rymdkapsel (works perfectly, not verified or marked as Chromebook Ready), Surviving Mars (playable, but not rated) and Turmoil (explicitly unsupported, but works fine).
Doesn't matter for how they're measuring. None of those games are marked as either Verified or Playable by Valve, so they're not included in these statistics, despite working fine on the Deck.
That is true, a lot of games can be played easily with the WASD + Mouse keybinds. Not unusable by any means, but it can be frustrating for people who get thrown off by the on screen prompts corresponding differently than what their controls actually are.
That seems to be the point being made by the person you replied to; the difference should be higher (in favor of the Steamdeck) because of the vast quantity available on Steam. The shovelware is precisely why it should be higher. I think they're expressing surprise that the Switch even comes within the range it does, hence bringing up Switch shovelware as a possible source for this.
Shovelware means games that are really low quality that some studios spam to try and get any money with little effort. Like garbage free to play games on mobile.
You know those cheap Disney ripoff movies? Like Finding Nemo comes out and then anyone with a copy of Blender and a few hundred bucks to spend on distribution starts selling "The Little Lost Fish?" The video game equivalent of that is called shovelware.