When Valve announced the development of a portable Linux-based PC gaming system called the Steam Deck in July, the gaming world was surprisingly amenable to the idea and quick to get in their preorders. A few people compared the Steam Deck to the Nintendo Switch, wondering if there was room in the market for another handheld gaming device. But the Steam Deck fills a very different niche than the Switch, offering gamers the ability to access nearly the entirety of their Steam library while on the go.
That very appealing possibility also brought up the question of just which games would be compatible with the Steam Deck. While at first Valve touted that it hadn’t found a single game that wouldn’t work on the device, it soon came to light that this wasn’t entirely true. Not only are there some titles that simply won’t run or don’t perform well on Linux, but many developers use anti-cheat software that may inhibit the ability for games to work on the Steam Deck.
Then there are studios who won’t or can’t offer support for their games to run properly on Steam Deck, like DayZ developer Bohemia Interactive. A Reddit user recently shared a screenshot of a direct message from the official DayZ Twitter account, in which the Redditor asked whether the developer planned to provide Steam Deck support for the game. The response was simply, “It’s unlikely. Sorry.” The reasons for this are unclear, but commenters on the Reddit thread had a few theories.
In September, BattlEye announced that it would be providing support for the upcoming Steam Deck. BattlEye calls itself the “anti-cheat gold standard,” and its availability for use on Valve’s portable device may solve the compatibility issues that would have kept some games from working on the Steam Deck. However, developers have to opt in to using the anti-cheat software. For some companies, BattlEye isn’t an ideal solution because it could dampen the performance of some games, requiring developers to put in extra work to optimize their titles specifically for the Steam Deck.
This might not be appealing to the developers of a game like DayZ, which is already eight years old and may at this point only have a small team providing maintenance and update support. The indie game studio has a number of other titles it's working on, namely the ARMA series that spawned the mod that eventually became DayZ, the survival game Vigor, and the free-to-play shooter Argo. Putting in the additional time to get an already successful game like DayZ on the Steam Deck, which may ultimately have a limited player base, may not seem worth it.
DayZ is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: Reddit