Epic Games has just released an update to its Easy Anti-Cheat software that will add support for the Steam Deck, as well as Linux and macOS operating systems. According to an Epic blog post today, the new update is now available to developers for free and is designed to work with Wine and Steam's Proton compatibility layer to ensure all platforms under Linux get full anti-cheat support.
This is great news for Linux Gamers and for the new Steam Deck, since the anti-cheat services were previously locked to Windows operating systems. Even though the games could be fully functional in a compatibility environment such as Proton or Wine. Now, more platforms have the capability to run all multiplayer games with Epic's popular anti-cheat software, as long as developers enable Linux and Mac support.
This is especially important for Valve's Steam Deck, which counts on its SteamOS being able to run the entire Steam library. Obviously, lacking anti-cheat support could have been a major problem for the new console.
But it appears Valve knew the anti-cheat SDKs were going to be a problem, and was working on a solution well before now. GamesRadar reported a month ago that Valve was focused on ensuring the Steam Deck would run every single game in the Steam library, so much so that Valve considered any game not compatible to be a bug. Steam developer Lawrence Yang specifically said "Something that we said earlier on is that we really want the entire library to work... If it doesn't work we see that as a bug and we want to fix it."
Thankfully Valve has now resolved this "bug", and the Steam deck will have Easy Anti-Cheat support before the consoles release in December.