Can you play Roblox on Steam Deck?
The ever-popular Roblox has gone through some massive changes over the last few months, but will it ever come back to Steam Deck and Linux?
Roblox, the game that appears to do it all, hasn’t been available through Linux for quite some time now. After purchasing an anti-cheat company, and implementing it into the game, it locked out all the users who might be on Steam Deck or adjacent Linux PCs.
The issue stems from similar issues to do with Call of Duty or Destiny 2, where the anti-cheat has safeguarded itself against malicious hacks on the game that could proliferate on the much more hands-off Linux OS.
Does Roblox work on Steam Deck?
RobloxRoblox doesn’t currently work on the Steam Deck, neither natively nor through Proton, and has blocked all use via Wine as well. Roblox Corporation hasn’t been too clear on when they’ll return functionality to users.
AtomicOperation, a staff member of the company, did make mention of it recently on the forums:
“To clarify one detail: while we have no plans to release a Linux client, we are aiming to support Wine again.
“It seems possible, and we see a lot of value in it as a way of letting people run on Linux without the large investment on our end of releasing a native client.
“For all the reasons described above, Wine won’t ever be something that we guarantee will work, but also for all the reasons described above, we’d really like to make it work.”
Essentially, the breakdown and simplified version of this is that despite the success of SteamOS, Proton, and Linux gaming’s big boom, the company sees no value in making a direct port to the OS. For this reason, it’ll be a while longer yet before they get it up and running on Linux distros via Wine.
Wine is a translation layer for Windows applications to run on Linux, and is the building block of Proton – Valve’s version – as well. Once it works via Wine, you can expect a Proton update to go alongside it.
