Frontier's Road to Steam Deck: A Developer's Side Quest

At this year's EVE Fanfest, the developers of EVE Online's survival spinoff, Frontier, highlighted its new driving controls and gamepad support—features that have transformed the game significantly from Fenris Creations' (formerly CCP Games) original MMO. As a big Steam Deck enthusiast, I was naturally curious if Frontier's gamepad support opened up any portable PC possibilities. It turns out some members of the team have been on a "side quest" to make it happen, as game director Sæmundur Hermannsson put it.

Frontier product manager Scott McCabe has been personally experimenting with the game on Valve's handheld. "I wanted to get on the Steam Deck," said McCabe. "I have one at my desk, and we're just kind of testing it out, dipping our toes in the water."

"Anything that runs on Proton, the Linux compatibility layer, can basically be squeezed onto a Steam Deck," McCabe said, pointing out that, at that point, there's little separating the Deck from a normal PC aside from power and performance considerations.

The original EVE Online, by contrast, has been playable on Steam Deck for some time, but it's a much less obvious fit for handheld play with its more mouse and keyboard-centric control scheme. "As soon as you start having a control system that works with a game pad," said McCabe, "There's absolutely no reason you can't put it onto these types of devices."

The Challenges and Benefits of Deck Support

McCabe cautioned that Steam Deck support was not on any official development roadmaps, but that "it makes such obvious sense with the manual controls now." Hermannsson was even more bullish on the prospect when I asked him about it the following day.

"It's a no-brainer," the game director said, joking that "I don't know if the marketing people will punch us or whatever" for over-promising. Hermannsson echoed McCabe's point that making Frontier gamepad-friendly in the first place was a far bigger challenge than anything specific to the Deck.

"We already have experiments running on Steam Deck," said Hermannsson. "We just couldn't get it in time—we want to focus on the gamepad stuff instead. The biggest problem we ran into was actually the launcher. It's not the game itself, it was just like some config files."

A number of high-profile multiplayer games are unplayable on Deck due to their anticheat being incompatible with Linux, but EVE Frontier sidesteps this issue by eschewing traditional anticheat altogether. Frontier is being built to be highly moddable—eventually open source—but with guardrails baked into the game to prevent cheats or exploits, something the team at Fenris refers to as "digital physics."

Hermannsson said he was less personally invested in Deck compatibility, as he wasn't much of a handheld PC gamer, but he sees it as a way of broadening the appeal of the complex, experimental game as much as possible. Frontier development director David Bowman put it succinctly when I asked him about Deck support: "Our goal is to get this to as many players as possible."

  • Frontier is designed for moddability and open source potential.
  • The launcher and config files were the main obstacles, not the game itself.
  • Steam Deck support is not on the official roadmap but is seen as a logical next step.