Electronic Arts is working on bringing Javelin anti-cheat to Steam Deck, Linux, and ARM

According to a job listing made by Electronic Arts, EA is hiring employees to "develop a native ARM driver for Javelin anti-cheat", and to "chart a path for EA Javelin Anticheat to support additional OS and hardware in the future, such as Linux and Proton". In short, this means that games currently unplayable on ARM and/or Linux PCs (like the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine) due to Javelin Anticheat requiring an x86 version of Windows may soon become playable on other operating systems. Since EA is still hiring for this position, it stands to reason that the soonest this will happen could be months away, but the investment being made confirms that EA is making an effort to expand Javelin anti-cheat support.

For fans of impacted games, this is huge news. Being locked to consoles or an x86-based Windows PC can be a huge limiting factor, especially for EA's roster of massively-successful multiplayer AAA games like the Battlefield and Madden NFL series. Proper support for ARM and Linux users greatly expands the potential player-base of these games and serves to further extend the library of devices like Steam Deck, which typically have the horsepower to run these titles in some form but simply can't due to strict kernel-level anti-cheats like Javelin.

That's really the greatest current weakness of Linux gaming. With Valve's Proton compatibility layer, gaming performance on Linux has proven to be quite competitive with Windows 11, even outright beating it on low-power handheld PCs like Steam Deck. Game compatibility issues these days are mostly just down to anti-cheat software simply not allowing games to be played outside of a controlled x86 Windows environment, but as Linux gaming continues to grow, publishers like EA are seeing more incentive to expand support to those environments as well. This is also a boon for the growing market of low-power, mid-range performance ARM Windows laptops like those leveraging Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite platform.