Latest GTA 5 anti-cheat update leaves Steam Deck users in the dust—and some are seeking refunds

After gaining some popularity on Valve’s handheld devices, GTA 5 will no longer work on the platform due to a recent update to its anti-cheat of choice. This has now lead numerous players to asking refunds from Valve, who is seemingly accepting them.

GTA 5 has been out for 11 years, nine of which it has spent available on the PC, and in all that time it didn’t contain any third-party anti-cheat. That is until Sept. 17, when Rockstar announced it would be introducing the popular BattleEye anti-cheat solution to its best-selling title. While that might seem like a good move (cheaters have been a known issue in the title for a decade), this decision more or less killed GTA 5 on the Steam Deck, where Rockstar’s sandbox action enjoyed a high spot among the most-played games.

Going by Steam’s official charts, GTA 5 is the sixth most-played game on the Steam Deck as of this article, even after the BattleEye inclusion gave it the “Unsupported” label. The primary reason for this is that the Steam Deck is a Linux machine running a compatibility layer that allows Windows games to be played on the handheld device. However, as stated by Valve in 2021, BattleEye does in fact support this compatibility feature, Proton, and companies merely need to communicate with the anti-cheat’s developers to enable the feature for their Steam Deck titles, which apparently Rockstar didn’t do.

There are also other titles running the BattleEye anti-cheat that are fully supported on the Steam Deck, such as Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, Arma 3, and DayZ.

As GTA Online no longer works on the Steam Deck (singleplayer is still playable), some fans have begun asking for refunds from Valve, who is reportedly accepting them. Per Pirat Nation on X, reaching out to Steam’s support could net you a full refund of GTA 5 and its downloadable content if the anti-cheat update bricked the title on your device.