With Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat in talks to get EAC supported within Steam Play, many readers asked about BattlEye as it's another anti-cheat solution blocking games actually working with Steam Play on Linux. I now have an answer on that.

I had a chat with the team at BattlEye and the result was basically this:

Unfortunately we can only support Linux if the respective game natively does so.

So there you have it. Titles like DayZ and PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS and many others are likely to never be fully playable on Linux with Steam Play. To be clear, I would love to be wrong of that of course. However, without the direct support of BattlEye, any progress towards it could be constantly broken any time it's tweaked and that's not a great situation to be in.

Since BattlEye does support Linux with native releases, if we want any title that makes use of it they're going to need to bring the game to Linux officially for now. For that to actually happen though, the elephant in the room is obviously the market share situation and how a lot of these developers don't see it as being worthwhile to do.

I've mentioned numerous times that such multiplayer titles will be a sore spot for Steam Play and it's likely to continue to be so for some time. At least, until we see the talks between Valve and EAC result in something.

There's also the new "Steam Trust" system Valve announced in January, as part of some changes coming to Steam. If developers end up using that (or EAC if it's eventually supported) then things for Steam Play may get better.