Fortnite Won't Update to Run on Steam Deck Natively

gamerant.com:

A large segment of the gaming popularity are aware that, at one point at least, Fortnite was one of the biggest IPs on the planet. In fact, it was one of the most played video games of 2020, beating the likes of Overwatch, GTA5, and The Witcher 3. With Valve just a couple more weeks away from unleashing its Steam Deck handheld system to the world, many would be forgiven for thinking that Epic Games' battle royale money spinner would be a shoe-in for the portable PC. As it turns out, that may not be the case.

According to a recent report from Gamespot, which references a tweet from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, Fortnite is not going to be updated to make it compatible with the Steam Deck. The post is in response to someone on Twitter who asked Sweeney outright whether the game would be getting an upgrade to make Proton, the system that makes Linux woth with Windows-based applications, compatible so it could run on Valve's upcoming device.

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The main reason, it seems, is that Sweeney does not «have confidence» that the company would be able to manage any online cheating within the game on such a large scale. Steam Deck recently became compatible with the main anti-cheat software, such as Easy Anti-Cheat and BattleEye. Prior to that, there were concerns that online games would struggle to perform on the handheld system, given that there were compatibility issues between it and anti-tamper and anti-piracy tools. In essence, it seems that the Epic Games founder does not feel certain that, with 60 million players, the studio would be able to «combat cheating» when compared to other online titles that have a smaller player base.

In which case, the Valve device won't be able