Update 15/03/22 - It's now fixed, with no word again from anyone. The EAC file was just put back nearly ~9 hours later.

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Quoting: RichardYaoLiam, as I said previously, being Steam Deck verified is not an official announcement of support because the developer has no control over whether Valve does it. The only thing close to an official announcement that we received was the developer merging its steam deck compatibility branch into master, which is not a promise of long term support.

Please stop treating Steam Deck verified status as some kind of official announcement going forward. Steam Deck verified status just means that the game passed Valve's compatibility checklist. Consequently, the steam deck verified status is likely to be revoked unless the developer fixes this ASAP.

That being said, if you restore a backup of the `easyanticheat_x64.so` file (default location: `~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Apex Legends/easyanticheat_x64.so`) after the update, the game will continue to work. Since a number of people at Valve play Apex Legends, I imagine that they will be contacting the developer about this, so it is possible that another update will restore out of box support soon, assuming that they do not disable the server support. As long as the server support for Proton remains in place, it is possible that this was a mistake. If server support breaks, then we know that this is intentional.

I disagree. If Deck Verified is not confirmation that it's supported (by either Valve or the developer), then it quite frankly makes it pointless. This is one of the only things the Deck has, and I will continue to report on it.

Valve advertise Verified / Playable status on their store for everyone to see, and on their Steam Deck Library pages and in the Steam Deck Storefront itself has a dedicated section just for these titles that shows by default.

If it's not official, then Valve 100% should not show it. It's as simple as that, otherwise it's thoroughly misleading and I will continue to report on it the good and bad because it's important and this whole situations only highlights further as to why.

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Quoting: mindedieWhy some people so obsessed with multiplayer always online (specially FPS/TPS) games/slot machines? Deck fully capable of running them, but you'll never be "competitive" on controller and less so on small screen and wireless...

It's amazing that this needs to be explained at all. As the article said, it's in the top 10 games on Steam. That alone should give you the only real reason you actually need. That, plus a Steam Deck can be hooked up to any screen and you can plug in a mouse and keyboard too. I've been playing it 99% of the time on Deck this way, and it has until now worked very well.

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Quoting: pete910And this is why I don't like this relyance we are heading for on wine/proton ! :wink:

Native FTW !

Native games aren't invulnerable to breaking, I've written my fair share of articles on exactly that.

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Quoting: roger6969Having a SteamDeck for the past week to play with I have a hard time with these comments. Steam Deck is a PC and no where like a console. If any game works that s a huge positive. Remember this is Linux not Windows so that fact anything or the amount of things that "Do" work and work this well is something to give some praise too. If you have a PC all games wont "just work" so why have the same expectation on The Deck it has a much higher barrier for entry.

I think you're entirely missing the point here that games for the Deck go through verification, like the title in this article. The expectation is that games that are noted to work, should actually work properly. People can keep saying "it's a PC" all they like, but Valve treat it quite a lot like a console.

Quoting: roger6969I made sure to have Games I play on Deck and Games I play on My Pc. They don't need to be the same. I love Playing Hades on Deck. I would never play it on My Samsung G9 49inch super ultrawide. SteamDeck is a PC first not a switch console competitor. If this is the mentality you start off with then youre doomed. The Deck is very very flexible and many games can run at over 30 fps on ultra and are super playable. I was surprise smaller tiles like Ascent ran on Ultra quality and looked suuuuper nice. This thing can play soo much and if your game does not work on the current Photon then go to compatibility tab in properties and switch to the Proton version that works best in your game.

Valve are marketing it very clearly that people should play whatever they like, you shouldn't need to go setting up a special list of games

To quote the Steam Deck website:
"Steam, without compromises"
"Steam Deck runs the latest AAA games-and runs them really well"

You really shouldn't need to ask why there's certain expectations for things to actually run properly.

Quoting: roger6969It's as simple as adding Startup parameters to a game before launching.

Desktop mode is an addition, not something that should ever been seen as a necessity to run games on it.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

For me, I don't really think any experience like that should be in the Playable category. Did no testing ever find any of these issues? How deep and repeated is the Deck Verified testing on each game? We really have no clue.

To be fair, what other category would it go into? It went through the verification process, so it couldn't be Unknown. It didn't fit in Verified (for whatever reason). You were able, technically, to get it to work (and it ran rather swimmingly), so it's not Unsupported. That leaves just one option: Playable. I'm not trying to score cheap points here, and I do think this is a problem, but it's a problem baked in to how Valve collapsed the infinite spectrum of "how games run" into just four categories:

Verified: this game fits all the other criteria (like font size, text input, etc.) to be enjoyable on the Deck. (Though looking at the requirements again just now, it technically doesn't specify anything about how well it runs—you could have a game that crashes to desktop every half-hour and it'd still be Verified if it fits the criteria.)
Unsupported: we don't support this game, or it just doesn't run. (You might be able to get it to run, but we won't put effort into making it run.)
Unknown: *collective shrug, we haven't tried it yet*
Playable: everything else. That runs the gamut from "literally flawless performance, but it gives you Playstation controller glyphs" to…well…what we see here.

I think the problem is that those of us familiar with ProtonDB are expecting something like Verified = Platinum, Playable = Gold, and Unsupported = everything else, but it's not a one-to-one translation, and even if it were it'd be more like Unsupported = Borked and Playable = Gold, Silver, and Bronze.

On the one hand, I can see why Valve did it: there's no need to do the incredibly messy task of quantifying how well a game runs. If, hypothetically, they'd introduced an additional "Problematic" category for games that are technically playable, but have problems…well, where would you draw the line? There'd be endless arguments about whether a game was Playable or Problematic no matter what they decided.

On the other hand, we end up in this situation, where if it's been tested (so not Unknown) and isn't Verified, and does actually run, then by default it ends up in the Playable bin, regardless of the actual experience of playing it. It's not a great look, and I think Valve might really have been wise to include a tier for "playable, but it's got serious issues" that they could chuck games like this into. The endless arguments would probably be less problematic than people buying Playable games expecting Gold quality, and getting Bronze. It remains to be seen if Valve will make any changes to the system in light of feedback like this.

Valid points and partly what I was alluding to, it doesn't really deserve Playable IMO when stuff like this happens. Valve don't really have a category it fits into. It's thoroughly frustrating too, because I'm not overstating that it took 30 minutes to get working through what I tried.

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Quoting: MohandevirJust read a comment from a Windows user that Vampire Survivors has the same issue on Windows desktop. It seems it's not Deck specific.

Have you contacted the devs?

The developer didn't verify it, Valve did.

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Quoting: toorDamn, seems like you got a terrible UX with it Liam, I've seen many videos of guys playing GTA V on the deck, I wonder if they had the same trouble installing it.
Fun fact, but not on deck, GTA V used to work on proton 7 for me, but was updated recently, and then I got this same error of yours, and only experimental allowed me to fix it easily (haven't tried earlier versions)

The thing I've noticed about many videos of random games running on Deck from certain channels is they didn't show the setup procedure which I'm doing in my various guides on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/GamingOnLinux [External Link]

The thing that concerns me, is how even on set hardware like this we can see such differences between people.

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More problems with Deck Verified, on a "Playable" title: https://twitter.com/gamingonlinux/status/1502710655576686594 [External Link]

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Quoting: ElamanOpiskelijaThis is your job now, Liam! You must do more podcasts!
Seriously, your input is very valuable and your podcasts have been quite rare.

Glad to see Gardiner do a little bit of re-branding. I think calling oneself "The" Linux Gamer is a little bit too much.

Thanks for the kind words, we have all said we would like to do it again but it won't be too often :)

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