Tim Sweeney says Epic won't support Fortnite on Steam Deck
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney described the Steam Deck in 2021 as an "amazing move by Valve," praising it as «an open platform where users are free to install software or their choosing.» But he more recently delivered some bad news for Fortnite fans who hoped to play the battle royale game on Steam Deck, saying that Epic does not have plans to update it for the handheld.
Fortnite isn't on Steam, but it should still be able to run on the Steam Deck, which despite the moniker is an open-platform handheld that you can do whatever you want with. It's a small Linux PC, if you want to treat it that way.
That led Twitter user Storm178 to ask Sweeney if plans are afoot to update Fortnite and its Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye implementations so that it'll run in Proton, the compatibility software that enables Windows-based games to run on the Linux-based SteamOS.
«Fortnite no, but there's a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti-Cheat compatibility with Steam,» Sweeney tweeted in reply. When asked why not, he replied, «We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones.»
Fortnite no, but there's a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck.February 7, 2022
Sweeney's suggestion that Easy Anti-Cheat (which is owned by Epic) is a reliable solution for other games on Steam Deck, but not for Fortnite, is surprising, although not entirely unreasonable given that Linux is open source and thus subject to fiddling and customization in ways that operating systems like Windows are not. Still, it's not the sort of thing you might expect Sweeney to admit. In subsequent tweets, he expressed that it's the size of Fortnite
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