Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but I find the fact that the anti-cheat for Elden Ring supposedly works on steamdeck but must be bypassed on all other systems rather alarming.

I should caveat what I'm saying by noting that Elden Ring actually works really well for me (of course I had to bypass the anti-cheat and can only use offline mode). I get a very solid 60 f/s (it appears to be capped) on my RTX2080S with only very rare stuttering (which is probably mostly from shader compilation and will therefore likely go away).

Anyway, the reason I find this worrying is because here we have an example of most linux systems not benefiting from valve's push for steamdeck. Does this imply that anti-cheat will make special accommodations for steamdeck that we will routinely not benefit from on other systems as seems to have happened here? Speculating further, could this mean an eventual "decoupling" of steamdeck from linux gaming generally because now you have a bunch of games that only work on steamdeck, so why bother making things work on other systems?

On a technical front, it seems a little odd that this should be possible at all (which makes me suspect shenanigans; in this case I have heard that they have a separate version of elden ring for steamdeck). I assume that anti-cheat works by checksumming binaries that it links to, which would make it extremely difficult to circumvent reliably. Another possibility is that it is making system calls to try to infer what system it's running on, but this seems much easier because wine already has to emulate these (though if games start expecting specific systems e.g. steamdeck it might present other problems).

Hopefully I'm reading too much into this: for all I know steam experimental is just a bit behind and on the next patch elden ring will work as expected, but it certainly got me paranoid about bad implications for linux gaming.