We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Is The Sims 4 Steam Deck compatible?

EA's popular life-sim might run Valve's handheld, but the overall experience needs some work before it could ever earn a verified rating.

Sims 4 Steam Deck compatibility

Is The Sims 4 Steam Deck compatible? Looking after your Sims has never been this easy, even if the Steam Deck doesn’t quite keep up with every aspect of The Sims 4.

As one of the best handheld gaming PCs, the Steam Deck has no issue with the graphical demands of The Sims 4. All issues arise from the developer unfortunately making little to no effort to have the game be natively playable on Valve’s console.

Is The Sims 4 Steam Deck compatible?

The Sims 4 is rated ‘playable’ on the Steam Deck, but the general user experience is quite poor unless you are using a mouse and keyboard.

There are plenty of games that are like The Sims 4 on Steam Deck where the idea of playing it on the go is more appealing than the gameplay itself.

That being said, The Sims 4 runs wonderfully on the Steam Deck, with a stable 90 fps possible on the highest graphical settings, although battery life is poor if this is how you want to play.

On controls, everything primarily runs through the right touchpad and right trigger, but keybinds can be changed around in the menus. The touchscreen is also very useful early on, but not the ideal long-term solution to controlling The Sims 4 on Steam Deck.

Graphical settings are the only Steam Deck rating criteria that The Sims 4 passes. This is painfully obvious when you start playing and the in-game text is small, the keyboard needs to be manually triggered, and lack of general controller optimization out of the gates.

Check out The Sims 4 system requirements to see what you need to play it on PC, and you can also check out some of the best Steam Deck games that are fully optimized to perfection.