Fortnite will not be supported on Steam Deck
Epic fail.
Many Fortnite fans may be left disappointed, as it has been revealed that Epic's battle royale will not be making a showing on Valve's Steam Deck.
Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, was recently asked by Twitter user Stormy178 if there were "any plans to update [Fortnite] to make Proton/Wine be compatible with EAC and BattleEye anti-cheat on Linux?". To this, Sweeney replied with a swift no. He did, however, reiterate there is a "big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck" (via PC Gamer).
When asked as to why Fortnite would not be getting an update to make it compatible with Proton (a compatibility layer for Microsoft Windows games to run on Linux-based operating systems, such as the Steam Deck), Sweenery 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."
This statement led to others to goad the CEO, with one claiming that he clearly has no trust in his own product. In response to this, Sweeney tweeted: "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!"
This was not the end of Sweeney's fuelled Twitter thread. Despite Sweeney making his reasons on why Fortnite will not be available on Steam Deck known, others had their own theories about its absence.
Musspell21 continued the discussion by tweeting "Admit it. You just don't like your star game on the rival's platform".
However, Sweeney brushed this idea aside by simply replying "Epic would be happy to put Fortnite on Steam. We wouldn't be happy to give Steam 20-30 percent of its revenue for the privilege". He goes on to say that supporting Steam Deck hardware is "a separate issue".
Even without Fortnite, a myriad of other games will be compatible with Valve's new hardware.
Titles such as Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are among the games to already be classed as 'playable' on the Steam Deck. Others such as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Final Fantasy have been classed as 'verified'.