Friday, March 14th 2025
Fortnite and Anti-Cheat To Get Windows on Arm Support Despite Abysmal Adoption Rates
In something of a surprise, Epic Games today announced that it is working with Qualcomm to integrate support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPUs into Easy Anti-Cheat, officially adding Fortnite to the list of games that are available for Windows on Arm. According to the post announcing the upcoming change to EAC, support for Windows on Arm in Fortnite will arrive before the end of 2025. Until the EAC update arrives, EAC will block Windows on Arm players from playing games like Fortnite because Windows on Arm devices use Prism emulation and translation to run x86 apps on Arm hardware. At the time of writing, the unofficial Windows on Arm app compatibility tracker lists a total of 675 apps as compatible with the Arm SoCs, 121 of which are games. This is compared to 17,955 games that are verified or playable on the Steam Deck via Valve's Proton translation layer, according to ProtonDB.
Expanding support for EAC to Windows on Arm could also allow games like Apex Legends and Fall Guys to run on Arm devices. This news comes in spite of the slow adoption of Windows on Arm devices, which Epic Games CEO, Tim Sweeney infamously quoted as the reason for not supporting the Steam Deck or Linux as a platform. "If we only had a few more programmers. It's the Linux problem. I love the Steam Deck hardware. Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it." However, market share for Windows on Arm still appears to fall short of the market share Linux commands in the desktop OS space.
The most recent data available from PassMark indicates that Qualcomm CPUs occupy a mere 0.3% of the laptop market and 0.1% of the overall CPU market share (when comparing AMD, Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm). Comparatively, most estimates, like the Steam Hardware & Software Survey, put Linux's market share at around 1.45%. In fairness, a recent report by ABI Research estimated that adoption of Windows on Arm would reach around 13% in 2025, however, this report was released in December 2025, and Windows on Arm market share has still failed to breach the 0.1% mark, according to available data.
A Counterpoint Research report in early 2023 found that nearly 13% of laptop shipments contained Arm SoCs, predicting this to rise to 21.4% by 2025, however we have yet to see this play out. The push for Arm support on Windows in Fortnite and EAC might remove the barrier to entry for enough developers and gamers that it could move the needle when it comes to adoption rates for Windows on Arm.
Sources:
Steam, Epic Games, ABI Research via PR Newswire, The Verge
Expanding support for EAC to Windows on Arm could also allow games like Apex Legends and Fall Guys to run on Arm devices. This news comes in spite of the slow adoption of Windows on Arm devices, which Epic Games CEO, Tim Sweeney infamously quoted as the reason for not supporting the Steam Deck or Linux as a platform. "If we only had a few more programmers. It's the Linux problem. I love the Steam Deck hardware. Valve has done an amazing job there; I wish they would get to tens of millions of users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it." However, market share for Windows on Arm still appears to fall short of the market share Linux commands in the desktop OS space.
A Counterpoint Research report in early 2023 found that nearly 13% of laptop shipments contained Arm SoCs, predicting this to rise to 21.4% by 2025, however we have yet to see this play out. The push for Arm support on Windows in Fortnite and EAC might remove the barrier to entry for enough developers and gamers that it could move the needle when it comes to adoption rates for Windows on Arm.
40 Comments on Fortnite and Anti-Cheat To Get Windows on Arm Support Despite Abysmal Adoption Rates
It's also pretty well known that Tim Sweeney does not like Linux, pretty sure he would port Fortnite to a literal potato before he even considered a distro :)
As for server side, it's not as simple, I personally feel like a robust verification system that prevents people to make multiple accounts, combined with good tools to manually review / ban cheaters is the way to go. U
sually the problem is, cheaters can just move to different accounts freely.
Chicken and egg. This is a good start.
WoA performs incredibly well at productivity tasks, especially if you rely on the MS Office suite to get work done.
Also, the battery life is phenomenal. I can go a week of normal use before needing to charge it, yet it remains as performant as it would be doing the same tasks on my desktop PC at home. Honestly the best mobile computer I've ever bought.
I had some missing apps initially like my VPN of choice not being compatible, but that's since been updated. And light gaming works surprisingly well. I mostly use it to play AoE and Two Point Hospital when I'm travelling.
Good to see Epics anti-cheat getting support. Hopefully the others will follow too.
All of this changes of course if you don't have another PC to do the heavy lifting for you (high-fidelity gaming, video editing etc). In that case get yourself a Ryzen-based laptop and you'll be good, but I'd argue that for most people, WoA is more than capable.
This type of great wall anti-cheat is not anti-cheat it is anti-consumer and a security threat. I... hate cheating. I actively participate in recording and posting proof to get cheaters banned. The amount of hacks that should be catchable server side that are not is frustrating, but anti-cheat being used as an ecosystem capture to cover for lazy incompetent anti-cheat devs is quite infuriating.
I watched a pubg dev talk where they boasted about how many cheaters they were banning permanently with hardware bans... and then he got defensive as to why people didn't believe him in chat.
As the player count never dips... when they ban 66k/week 38k devices... and a 2min google shows, reinstall windows to bypass hardware ban.
www.pubg.com/en/news/8296
Now to be fair... it is very rare to encounter an aimbot. But they have all but given up on recoil macros and zero-bullet time. (all bullets of a mag hit you when the first bullet connects)
And im dragging us off topic.
IDK I think windows 11 rolling releases puts it in the same category of linux with a very un-unified kernel space, because the anti-cheat is tied to the kernel versions. So it being an arm-kernel or an x86 kernel has little impact.
The battery life improvements are exactly what I need.
So that brings us back to the whole "Fortnite on WoA" thing as being a wasted effort and a pointless endeavour.