Steam Deck won’t run Fortnite, Epic confirms

techradar.com:

Fortnite won’t be playable on the Steam Deck, Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney has clarified.

The news came via a series of tweets from the CEO in response to a denizen of Twitter who asked whether there were any plans to update Fortnite to make it Proton-compatible (in terms of its anti-cheat systems) so it could run on the Steam Deck (which uses the Proton compatibility layer to play Windows games).

The short answer was no, as you can see for yourself:

Fortnite no, but there's a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck.February 7, 2022

Sweeney did make it clear that Easy Anti Cheat – and remember, EAC is the anti-cheat system which Epic owns (and one that’s used in Fortnite, of course) – is the subject of a ‘big effort’ to maximize compatibility with the Steam Deck (an initiative that we’ve heard a lot about from Valve already).

While Fortnite isn’t on Steam, as you’re doubtless aware, enterprising users could still be able to run the battle royale on the Steam Deck in theory – the handheld is a Linux PC at heart, after all. If Fortnite was updated to work with Proton under Linux, that is, but what Sweeney is making clear is that this isn’t going to happen.

Making Fortnite compatible would be a matter of updating the game and tuning its anti-cheat tech to play nice with Proton. However, as Sweeney makes clear, he isn’t convinced this is the right thing to do in that it would make for an ongoing headache in terms of policing cheating within the game. As the CEO tweets: “We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of [Linux] kernel configurations including custom ones.”

When the first reply to that tweet was an accusation that “newsflash: CEO does not