Does Gray Zone Warfare run on Steam Deck? Compatibility and performance, explained

The ease of access provided by the Steam Deck has posed a question that everyone asks when a new game comes out. And that question is: Does Gray Zone Warfare run on Steam Deck? The latest extraction shooter to draw some popularity, Gray Zone Warfare takes a couple of pages from games like Escape from Tarkov (minus the egregious pay-to-win options). But can the game be contained to the portable Valve handheld device?

Can you run Gray Zone Warfare on Steam Deck?

Just because a game isn’t verified on the Steam Deck, doesn’t mean it can’t be played on the Steam Deck. There are ways to get around not having official controls, but if a game’s performance is not consistent, it might as well be unplayable.

From what players can surmise from trying the game out in early access, Gray Zone Warfare can not run properly on Steam Deck. While the PC version of the game already experiences multiple bugs and crashes, the game on Steam Deck seems downright abysmal. A channel by the name of TestGame on YouTube posted a video showing the game “running” on their Steam Deck.

I use the word running loosely because the game can be seen on the lowest settings struggling to get 20 fps. Add a lot of screen tearing on top of that, and you have a clearly unplayable game on the Steam Deck. But that’s even if you get the game to start up to begin with.

I believe TestGame is running an alternate version of Windows on their Steam Deck, allowing them to play games a normal Steam Deck wouldn’t allow. With this in mind, we can confirm that Gray Zone Warfare is currently not compatible with SteamOS. According to players, a problem with the game’s anti-cheat software: Easy Anti-Cheat.

Since the game is still in early access, we can wait and see if the devs will think about putting it on the Steam Deck in the future. But for now, we can continue to play the game on PC, and figure out how to fix all the frustrating matchmaking errors.