Fortnite won’t be playable on Steam Deck

In anticipation of the Steam Deck launch, Valve has been reviewing the entire Steam library to verify as many compatible games as possible for the handheld PC. As of this writing, 121 games have been verified, from Dark Souls sequels to Final Fantasy entries to PlayStation ports like Horizon Zero Dawn. But what about Fortnite?

Well, Fortnite is already unavailable on Steam — you’ll only find it on the Epic Games Store on PC, which makes sense given that the battle royale game is developed by Epic. The studio’s founder and CEO Tim Sweeney was still asked about the possibility, however. Twitter user @Stormy178 inquired about updating Fortnite to work with certain anti-cheat software on Linux, to which Sweeney simply responded, “no.”

However, there is a glimmer of hope in the rest of the reply. “There’s a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti-Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck,” Sweeney continued. It’s not the competition with Valve that’s preventing Fortnite from coming to Steam Deck — it’s the possibility of cheating. “We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations, including custom ones,” Sweeney said while answering another question.

Fortnite no, but there's a big effort underway to maximize Easy Anti Cheat compatibility with Steam Deck.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) February 7, 2022

For now, there are no plans to bring Fortnite to Steam Deck. Should Easy Anti-Cheat become more viable on the handheld in the future, that could change.