You can no longer play Apex Legends on your Steam Deck

Apex Legends has always had a pretty serious problem with cheating, to the point where an average of about 100,000 accounts are banned monthly. According to developer Respawn Entertainment, Linux specifically is a hotbed for cheating, and this includes the Steam Deck as well, which means it’s got to go.

And, indeed, the Steam Deck is gone. You can no longer play Apex Legends on your Steam Deck if that was a thing you did up until now, but the good news is that Respawn has done this for its players’ own good. In a very broad, generalized sense. “In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex,” says Respawn, “we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game.”

Respawn Entertainment is actually banning Linux, not just the Deck

This may seem particularly egregious if you’ve been enjoying Apex on the Deck, as the game has enjoyed surprisingly excellent support from Respawn on the handheld until now. It’s even made its way onto Destructoid’s list of top free games to play on the Deck, and even had a ‘Verified’ badge on its store page.

As sad as this might be, Respawn’s reasoning is sound: “In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats,” says the Steam blog post. “As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game. While this will impact a small number of Apex players, we believe the decision will meaningfully reduce instances of cheating in our game.”

One might read this as an admission that there are more Linux cheaters than legitimate Steam Deck players enjoying Apex Legends on the device. As per Respawn, “There is currently no reliable way for us to differentiate a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious cheat claiming to be a Steam Deck (via Linux),” which is indeed the case.

This isn’t a temporary solution, either. “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,” which implies the company isn’t going to continue working to support Linux in any meaningful way.

Sadly, developers are slowly dropping support for Linux in situations where their games rely on a level and balanced playing field. A few months ago, EA WRC announced it would no longer be playable on the Steam Deck, either, and I’m certain more will follow suit. As good and impressive as SteamOS is, it’s clearly a pain to support for competitive titles, and so the Deck is being cut off. Oh, but hey, Sulfur is pretty darn great on the Deck, so I recommend it.