Last week Valve announced that Battleye anti-cheat support is now official for numerous games:

• Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
• ARK: Survival Evolved
• Arma 3
• DayZ
• Unturned
• Planetside 2

Turns out that I have one of them, ARMA3, and I could test that it indeed works, by filtering for Battleye only servers and trying to join such servers from Linux with Proton (note that you need to disable most of your mods if you intend on joining online competition). It seems like Steam downloads a specific Battleye package before running ARMA3 after this update, so you don’t really have to do anything on your end.

Don’t worry about the not so great framerate in-game, this is because I was running the game on a low-end config and did not both optimizing for it either in the settings. Also, running OBS in the background to record the video surely did not help. Still, as you can see Battleye works as expected.

By the way, while ARMA3 is now considered an old game (2013), it’s still a fantastic military confrontation simulator, with great solo campaigns (official, DLC and community mods). If you are ever in the genre, it’s one of those games when you can sink hundreds of hours easily.

Back to Battleye, if you are a developer, these are the instructions given by Valve to make Battleye work on Proton if your intend on using it:

If you’re using BattlEye and would like to support Steam Deck, reach out to BattlEye directly to request that they enable support. If your game uses BattlEye and you have follow up questions for Valve, reach out to us here.

Next step for Valve and the Steam Deck? Getting EAC to work, since it’s one of the most popular anti-cheat solutions with the biggest multiplayer games on Steam.