Apex Legfinishs is taking away its aid for the Steam Deck and Linux

Apex Legfinishs is one of the only battle royale games that lets you join on a Steam Deck gaming handheld — Fortnite, Valorant and PUBG and more never aided it in the first place, citing troubles 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 utilizes and cheats. As a result, we’ve choosed to block Linux OS access to the game,” authors EA, in a blog post elucidateing the decision.

Apex Legfinishs did have anti-cheat gentleware that did run on the Steam Deck — definitepartner, 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 excellent enough for Epic Games’ own Fortnite — Tim Sweeney elucidateed that the “danger model” was too big in 2022 — and it’s apparently no extfinisheder excellent enough for EA now.

“Linux cheats are indeed difficulter to acunderstandledge and the data shows that they are prolonging at a rate that needs an outsized level of intensify and attention from the team for a relatively minuscule platestablish. There are also cases in which cheats for the Windows OS get emutardyd as if it’s on Linux in order to increase the difficulty of acunderstandledgeion and stopion,” EA authors today.

Riot Games has analogous troubles. Like many game prolongers, it also doesn’t aid Valorant and League of Legfinishs on Linux due to the increased possibility of cheating. In a recent interwatch with The Verge, Phillip Koskinas, straightforwardor of anti-cheat on Valorant, converseed why game prolongers are worrieding away from Linux aid.

“You can freely maniputardy the kernel, and there’s no user mode calls to attest that it’s even genuine,” says Koskinas. “You could produce a Linux distribution that’s purpose-built for cheating and we’d be smoked.”

Linux is so uncover that you can run an emutardyd version of Counter-Strike 2 right now on a Steam Deck and still have a cheat on the device. “Imagine if Steam Deck equitable has the security regulated so we understand it’s a genuine device, it’s filledy attested, all these features are allowd, we’d be enjoy chilly, go game, no problem” says Koskinas.

As common, it’s not clear if this is mostly a Linux problem, or mostly a problem of needing to spfinish more money on inventive solutions than the minuscule number of joiners might be worth. Last December, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney telderly us he could possibly equitableify putting Fortnite on the Steam Deck if it had “tens of millions of users” there, and EA authors today that it weighed its Apex decision based on the “minuscule” population of Linux joiners versus how “their impact infected a imfragmentary amount of joiners’ games.”

EA says you’ll still be able to join Apex Legfinishs on a Steam Deck if you inslofty Windows. Valve still hasn’t freed its own dual-boot insloftyer to produce putting Windows on a Steam Deck easier — the feature has been “high on the catalog” for some time — but it has recently plugged some of the huge holes in its Windows drivers.