Civilization 7 has been Steam Deck Verified ahead of its launch next month

Digital Ben Franklin looking very perturbed on dark background — (Image credit: Firaxis)

Firaxis has announced that Civilization 7 has been verified for Steam Deck ahead of its launch on February 11. This will be the first entry in the series to get the full green checkmark seal of approval on Valve's popular Linux-based handheld.

Civilizations 5 and 6 are both playable, but with caveats on Steam Deck: The primary hang-ups for both seem to be text legibility on the Deck's small screen, and the need to manually invoke the Deck's keyboard for certain functions. Neither of those is usually a dealbreaker for me when considering games for Steam Deck, though Civ is such a wordy series, I could see eye strain from small text being more of an issue than usual. Like both of those games, the system's raw graphical grunt is not at all a problem with Civ 7⁠—it has some very breezy and lightweight system requirements:

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OS: Win 10 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i5-4690 / Intel i3-10100 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1050 / AMD RX 460 / Intel Arc A380
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 20 GB available space

I can't imagine it took too much development effort to make sure Civ 7 plays nice with the Steam Deck, and it strikes me as a no-brainer move too. Civilization 6 was successfully ported to the Nintendo Switch after all, and the series' relaxed pace of play should make the transition from mouse and keyboard to a pad more comfortable than with other PC-first games. Between taking Civ 7 handheld at launch and the structural changes Firaxis has promised for the game, it should be easier than ever to actually finish a game of Civilization with this one. For more on Civilization 7, you can read about why it's our most-wanted upcoming game of 2025.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.

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