When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn 
GTA V Online mode will stop working on the Steam Deck’s standard and OLED variants due to a new anti-cheat software.
Rockstar Games is reportedly dropping support for the Steam Deck, which will prevent the uber-popular Grand Theft Auto V from running on it. And no, this isn’t in anticipation of GTA 6 — not that we should be hopeful anyway—but instead of Valve’s choice of running the Steam Deck on a custom Linux-based interface.
The apparent culprit is Steam Deck’s incompatibility with the newly-integrated “BattlEye” anti-cheat software in GTA V. Steam Deck’s SteamOS runs a transition layer called Proton that allows games designed for Windows to run seamlessly on the handheld console. But while it’s intended to run games, Windows apps like anti-cheat tools can malfunction.
This will likely hurt a large audience, especially since GTA V is among the 10 most played games on the Steam Deck as of August 2024. Rockstar’s FAQs say the new anti-cheat update only breaks online mode while the story mode should function as earlier. However, it also cautions that both GTA V’s story mode and GTA Online are not officially supported on the Steam Deck, and that all technical queries must be directed to Valve instead.
Before GTA V, other popular titles such as PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege, and Roblox have had similar compatibility issues and lack of Linux support that prevented them from working on the Steam Deck. Simultaneously, while Epic Games has been assisting other publishers in their transitions to the Steam Deck by helping to port anti-cheat software, its own Fortnite remains unsupported on the platform.
Fortnite no, but there's a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) February 7, 2022
Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney previously posted on X saying the breadth of kernel modifications in the Linux ecosystem may be difficult to tackle at Fortnite’s scale.
It’s not clear why Rockstar is adamant about not supporting the Steam Deck, especially when BattlEye has been supported on Valve’s Proton for nearly three years. Valve had previously compared enabling the software’s support on specific hardware to as easy as sending an email.
Rockstar isn’t alone, though. About 30% of the total titles listed on Steam are unsupported on the Steam Deck for reasons including the anti-cheat incompatibility. There are some not-so-perfect workarounds, including running games through compatibility layers such as Wine. A more drastic step involves installing Windows on the Steam Deck, though you may not make the most of the hardware if you plan to run Windows 11.
