In doing so, the American publisher is giving a nice boost to the Steam Deck, the portable PC console that Valve is preparing to market.
Unveiled last July, the Steam Deck is a hybrid machine that Valve - its creator - intends to place as a sort of bridge between the world of the PC and that of portable consoles. The (not so) small machine does indeed feature a 7-inch screen and all the controls needed for the most modern games, but is based - inside - on components found in relatively sturdy PCs: there's obviously no question of competing with the 3000 series GeForce RTX, but the Zen 2 / RDNA 2-based AMD APU gives it enough power to run even the most modern games in 720p.
Valve has stated that the vast majority of the game library on its Steam platform will be compatible with the Steam Deck when it is released in December. A big problem for Valve: most of the games on Steam are designed to run on Windows and the Steam Deck runs on a modified version of Linux. Valve has therefore logically explained that it relies on the Proton overlay so that Windows games can run on its Linux and in fact, the thing works quite well ... at least on offline games. Indeed, for online games another problem arises: the compatibility of software intended to curb cheating. These famous anti-cheats are also usually designed only for Windows.
However, Epic Games has just made a nice gift to Valve. If the two companies are in competition on dematerialized platforms (Epic Games Store vs. Steam), they are in the same boat when it comes to supporting video games on PC. To that end, Epic Games is distributing Easy Anti-Cheat, a service designed to help developers set up safeguards and prevent cheating from taking over their online games. When it was released, Easy Anti-Cheat only worked on Windows, but since last week's update, it has become fully compatible with Linux and macOS. Even better, Epic Games says it also supports Wine and Proton overlays.
In one fell swoop, such popular games asApex Legends, Dead by Daylight or War Thunder become Steam Deck compatible. Outside the Steam Top25, there are other popular games like 7 Days to Die, Fall Guys, Black Desert, Hunt: Showdown, Paladins or Halo Master Chief Collection. For Valve this is of course a very good thing, but there is still work to do as many games rely on another anti-cheat tool, Battleye. The latter is not yet compatible with Linux, but it is possible that things will change before the Steam Deck is released.
