Anti-cheat update leaves GTA Online’s Steam Deck players out in the cold

Valve says Rockstar could fix the issue quickly, if it wants to.

Last week, Rockstar added BattlEye support to Grand Theft Auto V, offering some much-needed anti-cheat protection for the game's highly successful GTA Online multiplayer mode. That anti-cheat support wasn't welcome news for Steam Deck players, though, who now get confronted with an error when trying to log in to GTA Online.

According to Valve, though, Rockstar could solve this minor technical issue with a single email.

In both a Steam Community update and a Rockstar Support FAQ, the developer notes that "Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online. You will be able to play GTAV Story Mode but unable to play GTA Online." As such, GTA V's Steam page now lists the game as "Unsupported" for Steam Deck users, because "the game's anti-cheat is not configured to support Steam Deck."

But BattlEye support on the Linux-based Steam Deck hasn't presented a technical problem to developers for years now. Back in late 2021, shortly before the Steam Deck's launch, Valve wrote that "BattlEye on Proton [and thus Steam Deck] integration has reached a point where all a developer needs to do is reach out [to] BattlEye to enable it for their title. No additional work is required by the developer besides that communication."

Shortly after that announcement, popular games including ARK: Survival Evolved, DayZ, and Arma 3 all took advantage of that opportunity to support both BattlEye anti-cheat and Steam Deck compatibility at the same time. But many other BattlEye titles on Steam—including Destiny 2, The Crew 2, The Day Before, and Riders Republic—have apparently not bothered to "reach out to BattlEye" to enable the same Steam Deck support.

What differentiates GTA V from those other incompatible BattlEye games is that the game has been one of the most popular on the Steam Deck, complete with a fully functional online mode, for years now. Without a fix, Rockstar's move will make a previously playable online game functionally unplayable for a whole lot of Steam Deck owners, some of whom have no other way to play the game.

Waiting for a fix

Luckily for those players, there are some signs that this situation might not last forever. In a Steam Support response posted by a Reddit user, a Valve representative writes that the company is "working with Rockstar Games to find a fix."

There's a chance Rockstar might just not be interested in letting Steam Deck players into their (newly locked down) online ecosystem, though. That's because BattlEye on Linux operates in a "user-space" mode that's much easier to bypass than the "kernel-level" protections it offers on Windows. And even stronger kernel-level anti-cheat might not work as well in a Linux environment.

"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," Epic's Tim Sweeney wrote in a 2022 social media post regarding the potential for Fortnite to come to the Steam Deck.

Modders have already decided not to wait for Rockstar and are working on their own BattlEye bypass for Steam Deck, which may or may not be effective at granting GTA Online access. Here's hoping that fix isn't needed for long and Steam Deck owners can get back into one of their most popular games soon.