Grand Theft Auto Online has, in an eyebrow-raising move, been given an anti-cheat software named BattlEye over a decade after the game came out. As a consequence, it's now officially no longer compatible with the Steam Deck, per Valve's own store page for the game and an official FAQ from Rockstar.
That's a pretty dramatic shift, considering GTA 5—and, likely, GTA Online—was formerly one of Valve's top-played Steam Deck games. It's even still on the leaderboards at the time of writing. Now, it's got a big ol' "unsupported" sticker.
Rockstar's FAQ and the 1.69 patch updates confirm this is intentional, at least for the time being. Both read: "Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online. You will be able to play GTA 5 Story Mode but unable to play GTA Online".
As The Verge points out, that's despite the fact that there are games with BattlEye which are Steam Deck compatible. Proton, a compatibility layer that allows Linux users to play Windows games (the Steam Deck's SteamOS software is based on Linux), is at the root of the problem: Simply put, games using BattlEye will not run on Steam Deck out of the box, so to speak. However, BattlEye can be enabled as long as the developer reaches out to the anti-cheat vendor.
"BattlEye on Proton integration has reached a point where all a developer needs to do is reach out BattlEye to enable it for their title," Valve said back in 2021. "No additional work is required by the developer besides that communication." In the same year, BattlEye also proudly announced it would support Proton: "This will be done on an opt-in basis with game developers choosing whether they want to allow it or not."
All this to say, while Rockstar's claim that the Steam Deck doesn't support BattlEye for GTA Online is technically true, the onus appears to be on Rockstar to sort that out unless something has changed. Despite this, both the FAQ and the updates state that "all technical support questions should be directed to Valve’s Steam Deck support content and community."
As a result, there have been some negative reviews left on Steam over the past couple of days—I'd hesitate to call this a bomb just yet, since there are about 20,876 reviews in the past 30 days, and the current grumblings haven't made a dent in the overall percentile yet. Still, reviews yesterday tilted towards a coin flip, with 626 positive and 602 negative. There's murmuring of an uprising, at least.
If it is indeed the case that Rockstar's being too stubborn to ask BattlEye if they could flip the 'works with Steam Deck' switch on, then that's a baffling set of choices to me, especially considering how much bank GTA Online makes for Rockstar. I've reached out to both Rockstar and BattlEye for comment, and I'll update this article if I receive a response.
