Image: Bungie
When will Bungie let Destiny 2 come to Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming PC? It’s looking like the answer is never — because the soon-to-be Sony subsidiary has published an help page that not only says the game’s unsupported, but outright threatens to ban prospective Steam Deck players (via Wario64).
The help page has a new section titled “Steam Deck and Destiny 2,” which reads:
Destiny 2 is not supported for play on the Steam Deck or on any system utilizing Steam Play’s Proton unless Windows is installed and running. Players who attempt to launch Destiny 2 on the Steam Deck through SteamOS or Proton will be unable to enter the game and will be returned to their game library after a short time.
Players who attempt to bypass Destiny 2 incompatibility will be met with a game ban.
Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The image, for posterity
We’ve been asking Bungie for five months whether it might support the Steam Deck and Linux more generally, which seemed like a reasonable ask for several reasons:
Destiny 2 is one of the more forgiving shooters in terms of controls, playing well on both console and PC
Destiny 2 was known to use the BattlEye anti-cheat software, and enabling that for the Steam Deck is as easy as sending an email, according to Valve
Destiny 2 already runs on Linux — Bungie had to port it to Google Stadia, which is a Linux-based platform. Admittedly, it doesn’t look its best on Stadia, but it’s quite playable
I was looking forward to playing it that way. But the last communication we got from Bungie about Steam Deck and Proton was on October 3rd, and it contained no answers. Now, it appears the answer is “we only run on Windows”.
To be fair, Bungie isn’t the only one to reject the Steam Deck without necessarily providing a satisfying explanation — Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney explained to me why Fortnite won’t get updated for the Steam Deck last month, even though Epic’s own Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) claims game developers can enable it with “just a few clicks.”
And while there is one hint that EA’s rival Apex Legends might come to the Deck, and Elden Ring does work on Deck (including online modes) despite generally using anti-cheat, it’s also true that many other top multiplayer games have yet to fully arrive.
Bungie and Valve didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
I did get Destiny 2 running via Stadia on the Deck. You can see a teensy bit of it in my video review.