GTA 5 is no longer playable on Steam Deck, Rockstar criticizes Valve’s portable console

Game news GTA 5 is no longer playable on Steam Deck, Rockstar criticizes Valve’s portable console

A solution that poses a problem

Since September 17, PC players can no longer connect to the official GTA 5 servers without having activated BattlEye, an anti-cheat deployed on PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or DayZ. This new feature is something that players have been eagerly awaiting. When GTA 5 was offered for free in 2020 on the Epic Games store, a flood of new players arrived, including quite a few trolls and of modders. Modders and RP enthusiasts need not worry since it is possible to deactivate anti-cheat to connect to community servers.

A change that comes with its consequences: players on Steam Deck can no longer connect to the online mode of GTA 5. On its help page, RockStar states “Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online. You will be able to play GTA 5’s Story mode but not Online.” However, in September 2021, the BattleEye team announced that the tool would be well supported by the Steam Deck:

BattlEye has been providing native support for Linux and Mac for a long time, we can announce that we will also support the upcoming Steam Deck (Proton). This will be done on the basis of explicit consent from game developers who will choose whether they want to allow it or not.

Responses from Valve and Rockstar

This is bad news for Valve since GTA 5 is in the top 10 most played games on its portable platform. Rockstar invites its players to contact the Steam support system. By following this advice, users have received very different responses from the company. A player testifies that Valve passes the buck to Rockstar and invites him to contact the studio while d’others explain that they managed to get a refund for the game. Valve informs in several responses that it is working with Rockstar to find a solution. In the meantime, if you want to get a refund for the game on Steam Deck and you have played it for more than two hours, you can try it by sending a manual request, otherwise the automatic response system will refuse your refund.