Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 loses Steam Deck Verified status due to poor performance

Spider-Man 2 is no longer Steam Deck Verified

PC games are becoming more demanding, and while Valve’s Steam Deck is a capable machine, it isn’t capable of running every PC game. That said, you’d expect a “Steam Deck Verified” game to run well on the system. That isn’t the case for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Over two months after launch, Valve has stripped Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s Steam Deck Verified badge, and we can blame the game’s poor Steam Deck performance.

Honestly, game releases like this call into question the merits Valve’s Steam Deck verification system. All early Steam Deck-focused reviews of the game cited poor performance. For some reason, Valve saw Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 as a game fit for verification. Now, presumably after some retesting, Valve has decided to drop the game’s Verification rating. As of now, the game is simply listed as “Playable.”

Spider-Man 2 requires extensive graphical settings tweaks to run well on Valve’s PC gaming handheld. These settings result in visual compromises. These compromises result in blurry visuals, and even with those sacrifices, framerates can still be all over the place. As such, this game cannot be recommended to PC games using Valve’s Steam Deck.

Props to Valve for seeing sense and removing this game’s “Verified” rating. If Valve ever releases a more powerful handheld, perhaps Spider-Man 2 will play well on it. After all, the only problem here is hardware performance.

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