Epic Games has no plans to update Fortnite to run on SteamOS, according to CEO Tim Sweeney, meaning owners of the upcoming Valve Steam Deck will likely have to install Windows to play the popular game.
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In a series of tweets, Sweeney said the company doesn't feel confident about Fortnite's ability to run on custom kernel configurations. Fortnite is obviously not on the Steam store, but Sweeney's comments rule out a Linux that could run on the Steam Deck.
The Steam Deck uses Valve's SteamOS, which is based on Linux, and uses a compatibility layer called Proton so that Steam games that are compiled for Windows can run on it. Epic has made its Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) software compatible with Linux and Proton, so developers who use it should be able to get their games to work on the Steam Deck without any problems. However, at least for now, Epic itself is not going to be one of them, at least not with Fortnite.
Sweeney described Linux (to The Verge) as “an extremely difficult audience to serve, given the variety of incompatible configurations.” Asked if it would be possible to enable compatibility just for SteamOS, he said: “ Linux is already a small market, and if you break it down by kernel version, it’s even smaller.” It may not be worth Epic’s time to deal with all of this, at least not right now.
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Plus, it's not like Steam Deck owners won't be able to play Fortnite at all — there's always the option to install Windows on the machine. Sweeney referred to the Steam Deck as an "amazing move by Valve" when it was first announced, calling it "an open platform where users are free to install software [of their choice] — including Windows and others.".
Source of information: theverge.com
