Will Battlefield 6 work on Steam Machine? Valve hopes its new hardware will prompt a fresh discussion with developers over kernel-level anti-cheat

The Steam Machine has been revealed, a new plug-and-play PC with SteamOS that’s the latest push from Valve into the hardware space. It’s also, Valve hopes, a game-changer when it comes to bringing some of the few remaining incompatible PC titles to Valve’s platform.

Eurogamer asked as part of the hardware preview if there had been any progress in regards to helping games requiring kernel-level anti-cheat to operate on the Linux-based SteamOS. The anti-cheat software found in these games, like Valorant and Battlefield 6, is impossible to emulate in a Linux environment, therefore blocking the games from even launching. In response, a Valve representative stated the following:

“While [the] Steam Machine also requires Dev participation to enable anti-cheat, we think the incentives for enabling Anti- cheat on Machine to be higher than on Deck as we expect more people to play multiplayer games on it. So ultimately we hope that the launch of Machine will change the equation around anti-cheat support and increase its support.”

The issue of cheaters in online multiplayer games has been prevalent for as long as online multiplayer gaming has been around, and Valve would know quite well the struggles in fending off nefarious cheaters. As the developers of Counter Strike 2, Valve created and updates VAC Live to monitor games and dish out punishments, but even Valve has struggled to keep the constantly improving cheat market at bay over the years.

VAC Live is not a kernel-level anti-cheat (meaning it doesn’t have access to the deepest level of access on your PC), but their peers at EA, Activision Blizzard, and other companies have released arguably invasive anti-cheats to combat cheaters. With the Steam Machine as a separate bit of hardware dedicated to gaming much like a console is, it’ll prompt further investment and discussion around how to combat cheaters without excluding the slowly growing proportion of Linux gamers, which reached three percent this month versus two percent for MacOS and 95 percent for Windows according to the Steam Hardware Survey.

If you’re looking for more information on today’s onslaught of Steam Hardware news, read our coverage on how Valve is improving its hardware distribution for this hardware rollout, how its new hardware stems from PC experience, rather than any attempt to disrupt the console market, and an interview breaking down how the Steam Machine was designed.

If you want Eurogamer’s perspective on each of Valve’s new hardware reveals today, check out our previews for the Steam Machine, the Steam Controller, and the Steam Frame.