Unlike Valve’s announcements, not all games in the Steam library might work on the Steam Deck. As revealed by one of the developers of Warhammer Vermintide 2, a compatibility problem with the anti-cheat software Easy Cheat comes to play the spoiler.
From the official presentation of the Steam Deck, a problem spoiled the party: the potential incompatibility of many games in the Steam library with certain anti-cheat software like Easy Anti-Cheat in particular. Indeed, the Steam Deck works under an OS based on Linux. However, Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) is part of the club of anti-cheat software that is only supported by Windows.
However in September 2021, Epic Games, developer of EAC, came to Valve’s rescue by announcing compatibility of its software with Linux and Mac. Enough to allow different studios to port their game to Steam Deck without worry. For their part, the developers of the BattlEye software have confirmed support for Proton and by extension, the Steam Deck.
At the time, Epic ensured developers could make their game compatible with Valve’s machine with just a few clicks. Only, it’s more complicated than that, as one of the developers of Warhammer Vermintide 2 explains in a publication on Steam.
Also read: Steam Deck – Valve Promises You Can Launch Any Game
Easy Anti-Cheat software will pose a serious problem
Indeed, there is a slight problem: in reality, currently there are two versions of EAC : a recent version that uses Epic Online Services (EOS) and an older version that does not use it. Until then, these two versions did not support Proton. However, the concern is there: Epic added Proton-only support to the EOS version of Easy Anti-Cheat, a version used mainly by the most recent games.
“Historically, most games have used EAC as a non-EOS version. This is the one that Vermintide 2 also uses. Epic only added Proton support for the EOS version of EAC. Therefore, implementing Proton support for Vermintide 2 would require a lot of reworking of the Easy Anti-Cheat implementation, which could also require all players to authenticate with Epic’s online services. – maybe even to connect to the Epic environment ”, explains the developer.
You would have understood it, the task of making the entire Steam library with the Steam Deck promises to be much more complicated than expected. “There may be other solutions or workarounds, but remove the old EAC and rewrite everything to implement the new EAC and potentially ask our entire player base to log in and sign through EOS for a share of An honestly tiny market that was (and would remain) unsupported from the start could constitute a breach of agreement with Valve and the SteamDeck ”. That is what is said.
Source: GamingOnLinux
