Ever since the Steam Deck was announced, multiplayer game fans have had questions. The handheld uses Proton to run games, which did not support popular anti-cheat systems, such as Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC). This locked out players of Rust, Apex Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, and other popular games.
Later, reports began to emerge that EAC received improved support for Linux (Wine, Proton) and Mac, and BattlEye also announced support for Steam Deck (Proton).
Now Valve itself has announced: “Our team has been working with Epic on Easy Anti-Cheat + Proton support over the last few months, and we're happy to announce that adding Steam Deck support to your existing EAC games is now a simple process, and doesn't require updating game binaries, SDK versions, or integration of EOS. Alongside our BattlEye updates from last year, this means that the two biggest anti-cheat services are now easily supported on Proton and Steam Deck”.
Starting Monday, January 24, Valve will begin testing Steam Deck games that use Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye.