Dead By Daylight Might Not Work On Steam Deck
Move over Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck is here to kick you off the throne of for the home/portable console community. Admittedly, there isn't much other competition, but still, the Steam Deck has the potential to be big.
Valve has boldly promised there's no game the Steam Deck can't handle, but apparently, there's at least one. Sorry horror hounds, it sounds like Behaviour Interactive won't be able to get Dead by Daylight up and running in time for launch. Oh Pinhead, it's back to the bowels of hell for you!
Will the Steam Deck play Dead By Daylight?
If you haven't played Dead by Daylight, players are tasked with either playing as one of four survivors or a single killer. Survivors have to try and survive the night, while Killers are hell-bent on sticking them on hooks like a morbid video game version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Speaking of which, there are horror crossovers with everything from TTCM to Saw, Silent Hill to Resident Evil.
While Dead by Daylight started as something of a niche indie game, it's arrival on Xbox Game Pass helped it hit the mainstream. With a loyal legion of fans behind the bloodbath, it's sure to be a big hit on Steam Deck. Discussing the game's Steam Deck potential during a Twitch Q&A (via PCGamesN), Behaviour had some grim news.
Dead by Daylight Product Manager Justin Banks admitted, "We do plan to support it, but we need to update the anti-cheat system. We don't promise that it'll run on Steam Deck on launch day." Here we go again, it's that old foe of the Easy Anti-Cheat system (EAC) - which is effectively it's very own Michael Myers.
Why won't Steam Deck run Dead By Daylight?
If cheaters were allowed to run rife in Dead by Daylight, we can only imagine it would be plagued by lightning-fast Freddy Krueger's or superfast Demogorgon. Similar to Fortnite's BattlEye, EAC can be supported on Steam Deck. The problem is, it's up to developers to make sure a game is compatible.
Worryingly, the game's Community Manager simply said, "We shall see" when pressed on whether the team would move ahead with the update. At the end of the day, devs are extremely busy and Dead by Daylight already has a huge fan base. Altering the EAC just for a potential Steam Deck demographic sounds like a lot of work.
With 16,000 Steam games already confirmed as compatible at launch, it's not like Steam Deck owners will be left without anything to play. Behaviour Interactive previously said it could handle Steam Deck, so we don't know what's really changed. For now, you might have to look at Pyramid Head's ass on a different platform.
