Steam Deck will be officially launching next month with full support for two of the largest anti-cheat systems around.
In a new update provided earlier today, developer Valve announced that all existing games can be updated by their respective developers to support Easy Anti-Cheat on Steam Deck through “a simple process,” courtesy of an ongoing collaborative effort with Epic Games.
“Our team has been working with Epic on Easy Anti-Cheat + Proton support over the last few months,” said Valve, “and we are happy to announce that adding Steam Deck support to your existing EAC games is now a simple process, and doesn’t require updating game binaries, SDK versions, or integration of EOS.”
That means developers can now safely bring their online games to Steam Deck with continued support for Easy Anti-Cheat without any cumbersome updates, a long list which includes the likes of Apex Legends, Battlefield 2042, For Honor, Fortnite, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Hunt: Showdown, Rust, Smite, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, The Division 2, and Warhammer, among others.
Furthermore, Valve reminded that prior BattlEye updates are still optimal, meaning that developers will also find it easy to update their games to support the said anti-cheat on Steam Deck.
Valve previously admitted that it was challenging to integrate a number of elements such as “whole game technologies and media codecs” with Proton, a Linux-based tool which Steam Deck uses to run Windows-based games on its SteamOS. Those challenges were cleared at the time, leaving behind “one-off problems” like supporting anti-cheat.
Valve assured then that Steam Deck would launch with full support for anti-cheats. The developer has hence kept its word and owners of the new portal gaming device will not have to worry about cheaters running rampant on an unsecure platform.
Valve announced last week that the first wave of Steam Decks will start shipping out by the end of February, “global pandemic, supply issues, and shipping issues notwithstanding.”
