Apex Legends is one of the only battle royale games that lets you play on a Steam Deck gaming handheld — Fortnite, Valorant and PUBG and more never supported it in the first place, citing concerns about anti-cheat. But today, Electronic Arts and Respawn are taking the game away for that very same reason.
“In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game,” writes EA, in a blog post explaining the decision.
Apex Legends did have anti-cheat software that did run on the Steam Deck — specifically, the game uses Epic Games’ Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC), which has been compatible with the Linux gaming handheld for over three years now. But that wasn’t good enough for Epic Games’ own Fortnite — Tim Sweeney explained that the “threat model” was too large in 2022 — and it’s apparently no longer good enough for EA now.
“Linux cheats are indeed harder to detect and the data shows that they are growing at a rate that requires an outsized level of focus and attention from the team for a relatively small platform. There are also cases in which cheats for the Windows OS get emulated as if it’s on Linux in order to increase the difficulty of detection and prevention,” EA writes today.
Riot Games has similar concerns. Like many game developers, it also doesn’t support Valorant and League of Legends on Linux due to the increased possibility of cheating. In a recent interview with The Verge, Phillip Koskinas, director of anti-cheat on Valorant, discussed why game developers are shying away from Linux support.
“You can freely manipulate the kernel, and there’s no user mode calls to attest that it’s even genuine,” says Koskinas. “You could make a Linux distribution that’s purpose-built for cheating and we’d be smoked.”
Linux is so open that you can run an emulated version of Counter-Strike 2 right now on a Steam Deck and still have a cheat on the device. “Imagine if Steam Deck just has the security handled so we know it’s a genuine device, it’s fully attested, all these features are enabled, we’d be like cool, go game, no problem” says Koskinas.
As usual, it’s not clear if this is mostly a Linux problem, or mostly a problem of needing to spend more money on creative solutions than the small number of players might be worth. Last December, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told us he could possibly justify putting Fortnite on the Steam Deck if it had “tens of millions of users” there, and EA writes today that it weighed its Apex decision based on the “small” population of Linux players versus how “their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games.”
EA says you’ll still be able to play Apex Legends on a Steam Deck if you install Windows. Valve still hasn’t released its own dual-boot installer to make putting Windows on a Steam Deck easier — the feature has been “high on the list” for some time — but it has recently plugged some of the big holes in its Windows drivers.