Fortnite Won't be Supported on Steam Deck, According to Epic's CEO

Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney has said that Fortnite will not be supported on Valve's upcoming Steam Deck.

In what might come as a surprise to many fans, it seems that Fortnite will not be available on Valve's Steam Deck, at least not without jumping through a few hoops. Yesterday, a question was put to the CEO via Twitter asking if there are "any plans to update Fortnite to make Proton/Wine be compatible with EAC and BattlEye anti-cheat on Linux?"

Sweeney replied "no, but there's a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck."

Naturally, fans were curious behind the reason, asking why Fortnite wouldn't be getting an update to make it compatible. To this, Sweeney highlighted that cheating concerns were at the heart of the decision. "We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones," he replied.

Others suggested that this meant that Sweeney didn't in fact trust his own product, to which he responded, "With regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite's size, YES THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT!"

Fortnite has made its way to nearly every platform imaginable, though given Sweeney's concerns, it's not too surprising that it won't be heading to Steam Deck. That's not to say that fans won't be locked from playing it on the system entirely, rather they'll have to install Windows onto it rather than use its default options.

Quite the hurdle just to play some Fortnite.