For anyone hoping to play Delta Force on Desktop Linux, the developer Team Jade has given a pretty clear no. That's despite it working on Steam Deck due to the anti-cheat they've used.
Much like a few other games including the recent Steam launch of Infinity Nikki, it's using Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE), which developers can activate some sort of device whitelist to allow the Steam Deck with SteamOS.
Writing on Reddit in reply to a user question about Linux, the Game Director Shadow Guo, answered:
We appreciate the love from Linux users, but unfortunately support for Linux Desktop is not part of our agenda in the future. Without a Windows PC, you can still enjoy Delta Force on mobile and Google Play Games on PC, thank you again for the support!
You can see more anti-cheat game compatibility on our dedicated page.
Pictured - Delta Force, Steam
Anti-cheat is going to be a messy situation for Linux gaming for some time.
For the moment I'm not affected by games that use anti-cheat not compatible with Linux because I play mainly standalone games, not multiplayer.
But now that that Valve has Proton, what are the excuses to this devs to not make their games compatibles? There are already anti-cheat solution compatible with Proton, why they do not use them?
Should I care? According to the ratings it seems to be a pretty mediocre title.
As a game? You can decide for yourself. As a data point? Yes.
The hacker in me says "how hard is to fake a whitelisted device to the routine asking for it?".
We appreciate the love from Linux users, but unfortunately support for Linux Desktop is not part of our agenda in the future.
They really ought to twig at some point that the desktop Linux market is twice as large as the Deck market. Making things for the Deck but not other Linux is just silly.
In this specific case, though, their "ask me anything" had lots of questions but only one real answer. Which got downvoted to oblivion. So I don't think things are going well for them in general.
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