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Fans of The Last of Us have had a rough time recently, with the PC port garnering nothing but bad reviews for the game. While Naughty Dog have released patches and hotfixes to improve performance, they’ve also just committed a huge U-Turn on the game’s support on Steam Deck.
Before the launch of the, many gamers were curious about if you could play the game on the Steam Deck. This was partly due to the lack of ‘verification’ on the Steam homepage, despite the months-old confirmation from Neil Druckmann that it was playable on the handheld device – “Ellie and Joel will grace the Steam Deck … don’t worry!“
When the game launched on PC on March 28th, it was immediately slammed by the community for incredibly poor performance, excessive use of VRAM, and constant glitches and crashing. This was a very consistent, recurring set of issues that even those with RTX 4090s and such were suffering from. So, if you could barely play the game on PC, how did Steam Deck players fare?
Not very well at all.
Trying to play the game on Steam Deck was near impossible – and resulted in hilarious graphics bugs including Joel’s face rendering pretty weirdly, to say the least.
However, a recent Naughty Dog hotfix stated that priority will be given to “fixes and patches before submitting [the game] for [Steam Deck] verification.” Alongside this, they’ve also announced the game as “unsupported” on the device.
This prompted many, including Naughty Dog enthusiast @videotech_, to vent their frustrations: “This is really disappointing news to hear. I bought a [Steam] Deck exclusively for this game.”
Prioritising the core game on PC might be the right move, however, those looking forward to playing the game handheld are rightfully angered. As the game continues without Steam Deck verification and optimisation, it’s only becoming increasingly likely that the game will be refunded by gamers. In fact – Steam specifically lifted their refund time-frame for the game as there were so many requests.
The U-Turn on Steam Deck compatibility is especially amusing considering the video on the official Steam Deck website displaying footage from the game. It will be interesting to see if Valve edit this in the future.
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