Electronic Arts announced Thursday that it’ll be removing Steam Deck and Linux players’ access to its battle royale Apex Legends in an effort to combat cheating, effective immediately.
In a post on the Apex Legends forums (spotted by The Verge) an EA spokesperson said it made this decision as part of its anti-cheat efforts. Basically, EA found that many of the exploits and cheats it’s trying to combat came through Linux distros. So it decided to block access for Linux users. And since Steam Deck runs on Linux by default (SteamOS is built from Debian and uses a layer called Proton to make Windows and Mac games compatible), that meant Steam Deck had to go.
“We had to weigh the decision on the number of players who were legitimately playing on Linux/the Steam Deck versus the greater health of the population of players for Apex. While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games. This ultimately brought us to our decision today,” the post read.
Granted, if you load up your Steam Deck with Windows, you could play Apex Legends. It just won’t work through the default launcher. You can also still play it through Steam on PC.
EA previously reported in August that it’s banned over 6 million accounts since launch, with over 100,000 banned on average each month. Currently, it uses Easy Anti-Cheat to monitor cheating in the game, along with its other titles.
This isn’t the first time a AAA title has been removed from the Steam Deck due to anti-cheat measures. Last month, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Grand Theft Auto Online were also removed from Steam Deck after integrating BattlEye Anti-Cheat, although Rockstar didn’t clarify what about it was incompatible.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.