Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is out on PC for a few days now (I am kind of surprised it’s out so soon, I expected the port would take longer to pop up), and it received a Verified rating from Valve for the Steam Deck. I was very impressed. A 2025 AAA game, running great on the Steam Deck out of the box?! Of course, that would mean the game runs at the lowest settings, but still!

Don’t get your hopes up. It’s actually a disaster, and Valve is completely to blame for the rating that’s basically false advertising at this stage. The default settings (that should be the basis for the rating) barely get you to 30 FPS, and you get massive frame rate drops the whole time, and blurry cinematics galore. There’s already enough videos about this, here’s one that goes into the details of the awful performance.

This is sad that Valve keeps destroying their credibility over and over again. You’d think they would learn - after the disaster that was the Verified rating for the Last of Us Remake when it came out, suffering from a very similar set of problems: hardly able to stay at 30 FPS without degrading completely the graphics settings. Not sure if the port has improved significantly since then, but the rating should be set on their current status, not on a promise of future performance fix.

If you see negative reviews about the game on Steam, it’s more often than not because of the piss poor Steam Deck performance, like this one:

ProtonDB users pretty much say the same thing, having to push the Dynamic Resolution Settings down to 33% (!) to make sure that they can hit 30FPS. People also complain from audio problems and general instability.

Does this port suck? Oh boy, yes it does.

And Valve is giving it its big thumbs up! Disgraceful.