Apex Legends drops Steam Deck support in bid to tackle “impactful exploits and cheats”

Electronic Arts has blocked Steam Deck players from its cooperative shooter, Apex Legends.

Stating that “the openness of the Linux operating systems makes it an attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers”, EA has determined that making its game available on the Linux system – such as Apex Legends – is “a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats.”

Developer Respawn said it was left with no choice given there is “no reliable way” to differentiate between legitimate Steam Deck players and “a malicious cheat claiming to be a Steam Deck”.

“We’re sharing today that Linux (and Steam Deck using Linux) will no longer be able to access Apex Legends,” said community manager, Mako.

“Our dev team wanted to provide a bit more context into this and share some of the decision-making process that happened along the way. As mentioned in our prior anti-cheat dev blog, competitive integrity is a top priority for our team and there are many ways in which we’re battling cheaters – this is one to add to the list.

“In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game. While this will impact a small number of Apex players, we believe the decision will meaningfully reduce instances of cheating in our game.”

“We had to weigh the decision on the number of players who were legitimately playing on Linux/the Steam Deck versus the greater health of the population of players for Apex. While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games. This ultimately brought us to our decision today,” the statement concluded.

Consequently, the Steam storefront for Repawn’s free-to-play battle royale, which used to be deemed “playable”, now states in no uncertain terms that Steam Deck compatibility is “unsupported”. Respawn insists this decision will not impact Apex players on Steam PC.

It’ll be interesting to see if any further competitive game makers follow suit.

EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson chatted to investors earlier this week during the company’s quarterly earnings call. Asked about the company’s live-service efforts, and the next season of Respawn’s shooter, Apex Legends, Wilson said the battle royale is in “an incredibly good position” within the live-service market, with a “strong brand, a really strong mechanic, and a very committed global community”, suggesting it may be a while yet until we see Apex Legends 2.