Valve wins the drama llama award after declaring ‘The Last of Us’ PC port ‘unsupported’ for the Steam Deck

wegotthiscovered.com:

Hopes were high for The Last of Us Part 1‘s PC release last week. Sony has a good record of PC ports, the franchise is flying high after the excellent HBO adaptation, and this is a premium franchise that’s never left PlayStation before. The reality hit gamers with a crushing thud: the port is riddled with technical issues, graphical glitches, and an inordinately slow shader compilation that may take upwards of an hour.

You can read our full review here and it’s not pretty.

Prior to release there were even hopes that it’d launch as a Steam Deck-verified game, with Valve even using an image from the game to advertise their fantastic handheld gaming device. We played The Last of Us Part 1 on Steam Deck and while it technically works, it’s very far from what we’d consider playable.

Now Valve has gone one step further and categorized the game as officially “Unsupported”:

Just Now: Valve has considered The Last of Us: Part I for the Steam Deck “unsupported”, stating the company is working on improvements. pic.twitter.com/bnu2koEBy6

It’s worth underlining that just because a game is listed as “Unsupported” doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t work. There are many games that function near-perfectly on the Deck that simply haven’t been tested enough to get the “Verified” tag. Even so, when we played it last week this status didn’t exist, so someone at Valve has decided The Last of Us Part 1 simply doesn’t cut the mustard on Steam Deck.

This verdict is likely to throw yet more fuel on the controversy surrounding this botched port, which falls very short of what we expect from a major release on PC. Here’s hoping Naughty Dog and Iron Galaxy can wrangle this into some sort of shape through patches, as a game this good deserves better.