EA removes Apex Legends from Steam Deck to combat cheating

Electronic Arts announced Thursday that it’ll be removing Steam Deck and Linux players’ access to its battle royale Apex Legends in an effort to combat cheating, effective immediately.

In a post on the Apex Legends forums (spotted by The Verge) an EA spokesperson said it made this decision as part of its anti-cheat efforts. Basically, EA found that many of the exploits and cheats it’s trying to combat came through Linux distros. So it decided to block access for Linux users. And since Steam Deck runs on Linux by default (SteamOS is built from Debian and uses a layer called Proton to make Windows and Mac games compatible), that meant Steam Deck had to go.

“We had to weigh the decision on the number of players who were legitimately playing on Linux/the Steam Deck versus the greater health of the population of players for Apex. While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games. This ultimately brought us to our decision today,” the post read.

Granted, if you load up your Steam Deck with Windows, you could play Apex Legends. It just won’t work through the default launcher. You can also still play it through Steam on PC.

EA previously reported in August that it’s banned over 6 million accounts since launch, with over 100,000 banned on average each month. Currently, it uses Easy Anti-Cheat to monitor cheating in the game, along with its other titles.

This isn’t the first time a AAA title has been removed from the Steam Deck due to anti-cheat measures. Last month, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto Online were also removed from Steam Deck after integrating BattlEye Anti-Cheat, although Rockstar didn’t clarify what about it was incompatible.