Apex Legends Can No Longer Be Played on Steam Deck

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This is some somber news to report on, and it is quite a sad one. Today, Apex Legend's dev team announced that they will be stopping any Steam Deck and Linux players from playing the game. This was announced in an article on Twitter/X, which goes more into detail on the decision they made, why, and the next steps.

The dev team made this decision to combat cheaters in the game, and they identified Linux as a path for many different exploits and cheats. Because of this, they decided to block access to the game from anyone using Linux operating systems, including the Steam Deck. They mention that the openness of Linux OS is attractive for cheaters and these are harder to detect. Their data shows that cheats from Linux are growing at a rate that they feel doesn't justify the small number of users that are using Linux to play.

They mention that they prioritized the greater health of the population of people playing Apex over the players legitimately playing Apex Legends on Linux/Steam Deck. Moving forward, players will no longer be able to access the game if you are on Linux or on the Steam Deck (unless you install Windows).

Apex Legends was a big game that was touted as Steam Deck compatible when the Deck launched. It was really awesome that it could run, and is another example of a big game that had Steam Deck support that can just wipe it away instantly (Grand Theft Auto Online is the other big game that did this recently). It's a shame they decided to lock out Steam Deck users, and while I can understand their logic, I would love to see if the level of cheating has been impacted by this decision.

Hoepfully, they can reverse this decision later on so we can enjoy playing Apex Legends in the palm of our hands, but for now, it doesn't look like that will be possible.

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