Halo, Gears of War, and Microsoft Flight Simulator aren’t on Steam Deck due to anti-cheat

Now that more Steam Decks are shipping out to folks, there are going to be a lot more people checking the list of games verified for the portable PC. Xbox has released its own list of Deck-compatible games, but there are a handful of notable exceptions.

The list, found on Steam, includes Xbox staples like Forza Horizon 4 and 5, Sea of Thieves, and State of Decay. However, four incompatible games are named at the bottom: Gears 5, Halo Infinite, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X — that’s the 2006 Steam release, not the 2020 game. The reason for their exclusion is clearly stated: they’re “unsupported due to anti-cheat.”

Concern about cheating was the same reason Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney gave when asked about Fortnite on the Steam Deck. It’s currently not playable there, but that could change in the future since “there’s a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti-Cheat compatibility,” according to Sweeney. That effort may eventually lead to Xbox’s missing games making the jump too.

Meanwhile, Valve continues to release drivers and devkits to let Steam Owners cut loose with the hot new device — it really is a PC, after all. The Steam Deck OS devkit has been made available to the public, and an official Win10 driver is out now for those who want to boot up Windows rather than Linux.