BattleBit Remastered, the $15 indie FPS that became an instant best seller on Steam last month, will continue to support the Steam Deck after its planned anti-cheat update arrives. The BattleBit team announced the news during a live dev stream held on Discord, and was later confirmed by a moderator on the server (as noticed by Steam Deck HQ).
This makes BattleBit a rarity on the platform: many multiplayer games that would otherwise be playable on a Steam Deck have been deemed “unsupported” due to their associated anti-cheat software being incompatible with Proton, the tool Valve uses to run Windows apps on the Linux-based Deck. BattleBit has been functional on Deck up to now because it uses a version of Easy Anti-Cheat that works with Proton.
When the devs announced that it’d soon move over to FaceIT, an anti-cheat software favored by CS:GO players for unofficial matches that isn’t typically Linux-compatible, players feared it’d spell the end for handheld BattleBit. Instead, BattleBit will use a “new version of FaceIT that supports Linux,” according to a moderator in the game’s Discord. They also say BattleBit will be the first game to support this Linux-friendly version of FaceIT.
BattleBit’s moderators have spent the last month banning players by the thousands for cheating and toxicity through both manual and automatic processes, often to the delight of players when massive ban waves are announced on everyone’s screens at once. Considering the game’s small team and its explosive popularity, it makes sense that they’d want to automate the process as much as possible.
Lead dev SgtOkiDoki has suggested that FaceIT will be a better fit for BattleBit than Easy Anti-Cheat. Thankfully, that won’t mean having to leave Steam Deck players behind.