Can You Play Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 On Steam Deck?

The Steam Deck fuses some of the best features of PC and console gaming into a convenient, handheld interface. Gamers can use it to play games both on mobile and docked to a display while also being able to easily switch between the Steam Deck and their gaming PC by using Dynamic Cloud Sync in their games. On top of all that, it allows players access to nearly every game in the Steam catalog.

That said, there are a handful of games that do not work on the console. It was discovered early on that "Apex Legends," "Destiny 2," "PUBG," and "Rainbow Six Siege" can't run on the Steam Deck. This is largely due to the fact that the anti-cheat initiatives that these competitive games require in order to run simply do not work with operating system used by the mobile gaming device. Bungie has even gone as far as banning players who try to bypass the game's incompatibility on the platform for this very reason.

However, now a new competitive game is on the horizon. The "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" remake is set to launch on October 28, 2022. This has fans wondering whether this highly anticipated new addition to the "CoD" franchise will run on the Steam Deck, or if it will be yet another black mark against the console's gaming selection.

The bad news is that it seems the game will not be supported on the Steam Deck at launch. When asked in an interview, Beenox Studio UX/UI designer Marc-Alexandre Boulanger-Milot stated, "No. The main issue with the Steam Deck is [that it's] running on Linux, and for the game to run on PC, you need to have the PC-developed kernel driver for anti-cheat," (via PCGamesN). This seems to be similar to the reasons given by many other competitive FPS titles, and so it makes sense that it would, likewise, not receive official support — at least, not at launch. Boulanger-Milot did concede that official support may be possible in the future.

One major difference between "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" and games like "Destiny 2," however, is that Activision doesn't seem interested in punishing gamers for finding their own way to get "Modern Warfare 2" to work on the Steam Deck. According to PCGamesN, Boulanger-Milot claimed that those who get the game to work on the console won't have to worry about facing bans. But this raises more questions. If the anti-cheat not functioning on the Steam Deck's Linux-based operating system is the problem, then what is stopping those who get the game to work on the Steam Deck from cheating? Only time will tell.