HANDHELD NEWS – Nixxes port doesn’t play so well on Valve’s handheld PC after such a change a month after release…

In mid-February, the somewhat troubled PC port of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 received Steam Deck Verified status. This was a few weeks after the release of the first major patch, which brought some much-needed stability and UI improvements, as well as autosave backups. However, gamers were skeptical about Valve’s certification of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for Steam Deck because the game was barely playable on Steam Deck. It was able to maintain around 30 FPS, but it required a lot of tweaking of the settings, and even then the game’s performance was not stable enough…

However, more than a month later, at the end of March, the company led by Gabe Newell looked at this review and immediately changed it, as Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 lost its Verified status. We’re not sure if there’s ever been a precedent for a major game having its rating changed after the fact. Sure, it’s happened before, but usually it’s been due to anti-cheat systems or the use of DRM, but this time it was simply that the story of Peter Parker and Miles Morales just didn’t run well enough on the device!

It seems that Valve now agrees with the user consensus: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 now only has a Playable rating on Steam Deck, and that manual adjustments to the graphics settings are required to get it to run properly. The port’s developer, Nixxes, continues to work hard on fixes for graphics and performance issues. The latest update was the eighth and was released last week. This improved performance in tree-filled areas (Nixxes wrote this, not us…).

We have the feeling that Sony shoved some money up Valve’s nose and was kind enough to adjust the rating…

Source: PCGamer