In the glow of our anticipation of Steam Deck's impending availability next month, Valve made an announcement yesterday evening clarifiying their Deck Verified process in regards to Easy Anti-Cheat. EAC is employed in many popular titles, among them Apex Legends and New World. Linux support formally landed late last year, but many games that utilize it are still coming up borked for Linux gamers. Developers' embrace has been uneven, unreliable. What to do about it?

As of yesterday, Valve detailed that they've dramaticallly reduced the developer burden of supporting EAC to a mere toggle. And beginning in two days they'll publicly disclose 'test data' regarding anti-cheat functionality in every game's Deck Verified score. If their data shows poorly, an Unsupported rating will be given.

I really like Valve's lean-in here. If anti-cheat support is now as trivial as claimed, there is no longer an easy-out for developers to claim. Certainly there will be other reasons a publisher may raise when resisting support for Linux multiplayer. But the Overton Window has shifted in a positive direction.

The public sharing of 'test data' is even more exciting to me. ProtonDB publishes all of its reports monthly. This inspires community involvement and greater understanding, such as this excellent recent post from BoilingSteam about trends in choice of distro over time. With more eyes on the specifics of how well anti-cheat is actually performing, we can be more constructive in debate and more effectively help each other. Kudos Valve!

Along that vein, ProtonDB now knows which games use Easy Anti-Cheat or BattlEye and provides a warning if you view pages for those games. This doesn't mean it won't work - review the reports to know more. I look forward to the day this warning doesn't need to be there and can be removed.

Over the last week, a number of other improvements have landed:

• Explore: Styling improvements, including dynamically-sized images across a greater range from mobile to higher resolution desktops
• Game pages: Mac support detects properly. thanks @j-k for catching
• Reports: Styling improvements, better responsive rendering
• Reports: Grammar fix, 'Stability: Frequently' -> 'Instability: Frequently'
• Contribute: Regression fix: Playtime represents time at point of submission instead of login. Thanks @NoxPhasma for identifying and verifying
• Contribute: Discord feedback link now skipped when tabbing.
• Contribute: Prev/Next buttons no longer exceed the viewport width on mobile.
• Contribute: Preview is now of width responsive to browser dimensions
• Home: ~30% less javascript required thanks to code-splitting.
• News Notifications: Now centered and allow for more text
• Translations: Turkish is now available thanks to @csengor
• Translations: Updated Spanish and Bulgarian, thanks to @xaltech and @mialy
• User profiles: Zero state when user not found
• A 404 not found page for unknown routes
• A global error boundary that offers to reset local storage in case that is causing issues. You can also reset local storage manually at https://www.protondb.com/reset

Development is underway to support authoring reports for the Steam Deck on ProtonDB. Happy Lunar New Year!

EDIT: Shortly after posting this, I discovered that the first tranche of Deck Verified games have been named. This data has now been added to ProtonDB and you can view them on the Explore page with the Deck Verified filter on. This can also be combined with library or wishlist filters.

--migelius (@buck)