Anyone hoping to play Fortnite on the Steam Deck in the coming months got some bad news yesterday from Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games.
As PC Gamer reports, Sweeney was asked on Twitter if there are plans to update Fortnite to make it compatible with anti-cheat solutions on Linux, thus allowing the game to run natively on Valve’s gaming handheld. Sweeney replied, “Fortnite no, but there’s a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck.”
It’s surprising for Epic to decide against porting Fortnite to a new platform, but when pushed for further detail Sweeney explained, “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.”
Seeing as Epic controls both Fortnite and Easy Anti-Cheat, you’d think preventing cheating on Steam Deck and SteamOS would be easy to achieve. However, Sweeney goes on to explain it’s the threat model that causes the problem rather than viable solutions to prevent cheating, “The threat model for anti-cheat varies per game based on the number of active players and ability to gain profit by selling cheats or gain prominence by cheating. Hence anti-cheat which suffices for one game may not for another game with 10, 100, or 1000 times more players.”
Linux is an open platform, and clearly Sweeney doesn’t believe any anti-cheat solution could stop a determined few from working around the protections implemented for SteamOS as well as any other Linux distro a player decided to load on to their Deck. They may work for other games with smaller player bases, but not for a game as popular as Fortnite.
That’s not to say playing Fortnite on Steam Deck will be impossible. Valve has already confirmed you will be able to run Windows on Steam Deck, so that’s one way you could get Fortinite running. Phil Spencer also confirmed Xbox games run well on Steam Deck, so there’s another potential method of playing Fortnite.
