Epic’s battle royale video game Fortnite has been confirmed it will not be available on Steam Deck for a number of reasons.
Epic Games CEO and Founder Tim Sweeney recently was asked by a Twitter user about plans to update the game to make “Proton/Wine” be compatible with EAC and BattleEye anti-cheat on Linux. Sweeney quickly said no to this, but he did say their development team made an effort to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck. It seems they were not successful on this, yet.
When the Twitter user asked for the reason that the game will not get an update for its compatibility with Steam Deck, Sweeney stated it would be challenging for them. “We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones,” he said.
It got a bit heated in the Twitter thread as some users said Sweeney was not confident of his own product. He did confirm that, but he had reason to do so. “With regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite’s size, YES THAT’S EXACTLY RIGHT!”
Another user speculated that this was not about compatibility. He thinks Sweeney just did not want their popular game to play on their rival’s platform. Sweeney then simply replied they would be happy to put Fortnite on Steam, but they would not be happy to give Steam the 20-30 percent of its revenue for the privilege. Supporting the Steam Deck though, he says, was a separate issue.
Fortnite is now available on PC, Android, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.