Will Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 be Steam Deck compatible?

Love it or hate it, Call of Duty is here to stay, maintaining the long-standing tradition of releasing a new title every year; a tradition that goes back two decades. Black Ops 6 represents the next iteration of Activision’s money printer, which will also put a big smile on Microsoft’s face after the company bought the franchise in 2023.

Add onto that, “Blops 6” will be available on Xbox Game Pass at launch, and you’ve got yourself an unstoppable profit-making formula right there. But what if you aren’t planning on playing the game on console? What if you have aspirations of getting your military-based FPS on via PC, or better yet, on the move with a Steam Deck?

Not very Linux-friendly, it seems

Okay, enough dilly-dallying. Let’s just say at this stage that until the game actually comes out, we can only really speculate. At the time of writing, the Black Ops 6 Steam page doesn’t have any information to go on regarding Deck compatibility. However, we can at least take a look back at the last few entries to see what the score is and extrapolate from that.

See, the problem here is the Steam Deck uses a Linux-based operating system called Proton. Because of this, the device famously takes issue when it comes to running alongside anti-cheat software, which Call of Duty typically uses. The Call of Duty games come loaded with the Ricochet anti-cheat tech, which is not compatible with Linux. As such, Black Ops 6 is unlikely to be verified for the Deck by Valve itself.

However, as noted in a recent report from PCGamesN, it is possible to duel-boot the device with an alternative operating system, such as SteamOS or even Windows 11. This should at least bypass any issues between Proton and CoD‘s anti-cheat solutions.

If we glance at previous installments, we can see this has been an ongoing issue for some time. Take Black Ops: Cold War, for example. As noted on the Steam page, this game is “unsupported” when it comes to the Steam Deck. The 2023 release of Modern Warfare also shows it as not being compatible. However, 2015’s Black Ops 3 is down as “playable,” but not “verified.”

In a nutshell: it doesn’t look like good news if you were hoping to play Black Ops 6 on your Steam Deck. The third-party website ProtonDB – which draws data from SteamDB and Steam itself – lists the Call of Duty franchise on the whole as “borked.” Make of that what you will. It looks like you can get it to run, but with some workarounds that might not be worth the effort unless you really want to play it on the move.