The Steam Deck’s Verified Landing Pages Are Misleading

Did you know that Steam has snazzy-looking Deck-focused landing pages for games that are “Verified” on the device? The pages have existed since at least 2023 but, as Steam Deck HQ notes, Valve may be ramping up the degree to which they encourage developers to promote them. Before a game even gets one, though, it needs to secure that coveted “Verified” rating. Valve actually has four criteria to determine whether or not a game should earn the badge. A game should: have no issues with middleware (such as anti-cheat software), launch without trouble or compatibility warnings, be fully playable via a gamepad, and, lastly, should “have good default settings, and text should be legible.”

What defines “good default settings” is probably open to some level of interpretation, but any way you slice it, for all their sleek visual appeal, these pages are misleading. The problem is that these landing pages feature the trailers for their respective games embedded into an image of a Steam Deck, which in my opinion gives a really false impression of how some games run. Sure, as developer datablob notes on BlueSky, in theory this gives a decent impression of how a game might look on the Deck, but just observe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Steam Deck Verified landing page.

The page plays the default trailer from the Steam Page which is clearly running on a much more powerful PC than the Steam Deck. Yes, there’s a tiny disclaimer at the bottom that says the footage was “Captured on PC” and not Steam Deck, but still, the context makes it easy to imagine the game running at such high fidelity and framerate on the Deck.

To be sure, I double-checked and spun up Rebirth on my Steam Deck and, nope, it still doesn’t look that great. And Rebirth isn’t the only game guilty of this. Avowed’s Steam Deck landing page also shows the game performing at a level of fidelity that it simply cannot on the Deck.

The recently released Ninja Gaiden 4 also has this problem, and the subtitle text in the game isn’t what I’d consider legible enough on the Deck’s smaller screen. It does run at a respectable framerate, but it definitely doesn’t look as sharp on the Deck as it does in this simulated experience on the game’s landing page.

I’m sure in the future, when the Deck gets its inevitable upgrade, it may run these specific games in a way that matches how they’re portrayed on their landing pages. But at that point, will there be new GPU-melting games that are beyond its capabilities, that are earning these badges and being featured in misleading ways on advertising pages? The Steam Deck deserves far more honesty.