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:
Minimum
- 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
Recommended
- OS: Win 10 64 Bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-10400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 2060 / AMD RX 6600 / Intel Arc A750
- 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.
