Valve: Getting BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat on Steam Deck Working Now Easy

Valve has announced that all major obstacles to enabling Easy Anti-Cheat in Windows games through Proton in Linux environments have been removed. The company now calls activating EAC on Linux “easily supported.”

Although Epic Games had announced that its Easy Anti-Cheat would be compatible with Linux through the Proton translation layer, until recently it didn’t seem as simple as hoped. Vermintide developer Fatshark Games, among others, sounded the alarm earlier this month, saying that activating Easy Anti-Cheat in Linux required developers to use a different variant of EAC than games usually do. Fatshark described that as a “huge amount of work,” which cast doubt on the accessibility of such games on Linux, at least for the foreseeable future.

Valve now seems to be addressing those concerns. In an update on Saturday, the Steam creator reports that “Adding Steam Deck support to your existing EAC game is now a simple process, with no binaries and sdk versions to update and no EOS integration required.” The latter is therefore what, according to Fatshark, resulted in a lot of work.

Such stumbling blocks had seemingly already been removed for the other popular anti-cheat, BattlEye. In November, it was announced that the first two BattlEye games will work via Proton: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and ARK: Survival Evolved. Of course, that doesn’t say anything about how difficult or easy it was to get BattlEye working in this context, but Valve also calls activating this anti-cheat via Proton “easy” in its update, in the same breath it mentions EAC.

All in all, one of the biggest challenges of getting Windows games working under Linux seems to have been solved here. Of course, there are other technical challenges with this move, which are tracked on protondb. That seems to be going in the right direction: in December it turned out that 90 of the 100 most popular Steam games at the time could run on Linux.

Valve does a lot of work when it comes to Linux compatibility. This is because next month its Steam Deck will be released, a handheld computer that runs on its own Linux distro called SteamOS and tries to run Windows games using its Proton software. Proton is a fork of Wine, with improvements made. Valve itself will also provide a seal of approval for games that work well on the Steam Deck.