Steam Deck support for EA titles broken after major change

❘ Published: 2022-11-01T12:14:49

Dexerto/Valve/Ea/Pexels

Steam Deck support for EA games has been unintentionally broken an undetermined amount of games on Steam Deck since ditching Origin.

Publisher EA is currently in the process of leaving its old launcher, Origin, behind. The new EA Play launcher requires a sign-in process, which won’t work on Steam Deck’s Linux distro, SteamOS.

What’s been reported, is that certain games will now load up a blank square, intended to be the EA Play sign-in window. We’ve verified this on certain titles.

With no support for Linux, and Proton, you’re not able to play previously ‘verified’ titles. This is because Proton, the compatibility layer that allows Linux to play Windows titles is unable to access it. Games that have previously been featured in advertisements for the Steam Deck now no longer work.

Possible fixes

This issue arose last week, with a Reddit user, wargzax, managing to put together a working tutorial for a fix. Since then, it appears this has started to fail as the security on EA’s side begins to kick in.

Some users appear to be running games like Mass Effect: Legendary Edition just fine. However, others are finding that titles like Dead Space 3 won’t even boot.

Another user commented that it seems each game is being fixed independently. A previous thread regarding Dead Space 3 pointed out that Titanfall 2 is still working just fine.

EA’s switch to EA Play is effectively DRM, digital rights management. As of right now, it requires you to sign in via the internet to enjoy your games. This is something that’s already an issue when taking the Steam Deck out and about.

What EA games are broken on Steam Deck?

As of right now, we’re aware of the following games having issues:

It would now appear that some work will need to be done by both EA and Valve to rectify the issue. According to another user, this issue has been fixed in Wine – the other Linux compatibility layer that Proton is based off – for a few months.

We’ve reached out to EA for comment. We’ll also be investigating the various fixes floating around to see if there’s a way through it.