Rainbow Six Siege has a huge following and a massive standing when it comes to Esports. Rainbow Six Siege is also one of the top most played games on Steam so naturally, players are wondering whether you can play it on the go on a Steam Deck.
Rainbow Six Siege is not compatible with the Steam Deck due to some anti-cheat software issues, however, you can play it offline which defeats the purpose of this game. You can play it online by installing Windows on the Steam Deck and running the Windows copy of the game (not recommended).
Rainbow Six Siege On The Steam Deck
Rainbow Six Siege is officially not supported on the Steam Deck according to Valve’s compatibility check. You can however play it on the Steam Deck as the game has full controller support but the main playing factor of this game is its multiplayer, which is disabled on the Steam Deck due to some anti-cheat software problems with the Linux-based OS.
Even though it is unsupported, the game runs on the Steam Deck’s SteamOS (Linux) at the highest Ultra Graphics settings and is able to maintain steady 60fps.
If you are willing to install Windows on your Steam Deck then you can access the Windows Steam store and play it from there. The anti-cheat problems do not exist on Microsoft’s OS. Though we do not recommend installing Windows as Steam Deck’s performance is optimized for its proprietary OS and having Windows might impact the overall optimization of the device.
On Windows, Rainbow Six Siege on Steam Deck is able to maintain 100+ fps on Medium settings.
Steam Deck, Ubisoft, And Anti-Cheat Issues
Due to being a Linux-based system, titles such as Rainbow Six Siege will not be playable on the device out of the box. Since Linux is incompatible with certain anti-cheat implementations featured in these games, SteamOS’ Proton compatibility layer simply cannot get past the anti-cheat check required to boot each title.
Valve has stated that it will be updating SteamOS to cater to these issues. They have said that the Steam Deck has a new version of SteamOS, and are working at “improving Proton’s game compatibility and support for anti-cheat solutions by working directly with the vendors”. In short, developers won’t have to go through hoops to get their games working on SteamOS.
This is where the main issue comes in as Rainbow Six Siege uses the BattlEye anti-cheat support on Windows. According to BattlEye, their system does have Proton (Linux) support and they have provided the developers the option to allow it (as seen in the Tweet below).
Apparently, the ball is in Ubisoft’s court to allow the anti-cheat software and make the multiplayer work for Rainbow Six Siege on Linux and by extension Steam Deck. According to the Tweet above, Ubisoft has to simply opt in for the service to make the game playable.
Users are flooding the Ubisoft discussion forums (it is one of the most frequent topics on the forum) and requesting that they enable the anti-cheat. Some angry players are even suggesting that “Ubisoft is too lazy to write a simple email to BattEye” to make it work and that “Ubisoft doesn’t care about the Rainbow Six Siege’s Linux community.
There is a lot of hostility against Ubisoft in this matter and we hope that this matter gets sorted soon for the betterment of the Rainbow Six Siege’s Linux community.
There is no official statement made by Ubisoft to this day regarding all of these issues. Whether it is just as simple as writing an email to opt-in or there is an actual backend implementation that goes with all of this is not known. We will have to just wait and see.