Apex Legends was a top 50 Steam Deck game, but EA's dropping Valve's handheld because it can't tell if those players are actually dirty cheating Linux users

EA has announced that it's pulling Linux support for Apex Legends, meaning that the game is no longer officially supported on Steam Deck. The devs say it's down to just how hard it is to catch cheaters on the operating system.

"The openness of the Linux operating systems makes it an attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers," the devs explain in the announcement. "Linux cheats are indeed harder to detect and the data shows that they are growing at a rate that requires an outsized level of focus and attention from the team for a relatively small platform. There are also cases in which cheats for the Windows OS get emulated as if it’s on Linux in order to increase the difficulty of detection and prevention."

Steam Deck is technically just a portable PC, so if you want to install Windows on the device and play Apex Legends that way, you'll still be able to do so. But if you prefer to use the handheld's official, Linux-based operating system, you'll have to find other ways to get your FPS fix.

EA isn't alone in deciding that it's not worth supporting Linux - or Steam Deck - because of anti-cheat headaches. As The Verge notes, Fortnite, League of Legends, and Valorant have all avoided Linux support for this reason. But Apex Legends was directly available on Steam, it had been verified for compatibility on Steam Deck, and was one of the top 50 most popular games on the handheld in the past year.

"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," the devs continue in the announcement. "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."

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.