Comment by simoncion

Comment by simoncion 4 days ago

> ...which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.

I mean, several of the major anticheats can be configured to work just fine on Linux. [0] It's up to the game dev whether or not it's permitted. So, yeah, unless the game is one where its dev makes huge blog posts about how "advanced" its anti-cheat is (like Valorant or the very latest CoD/Battlefield games) it's quite likely that multiplayer games will work just fine on Linux.

And if they don't, and the faulty game is a new purchase on Steam, then ask for a refund and tell them that the game doesn't work with your OS. Easy, peasy.

[0] I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux. On Linux, I play THE FINALS, Elden Ring, and a couple of other EAC-"protected" games without any troubles. I have perhaps-unreliable memories that at least one of the games I play uses Denuvo, which is only sometimes used as anti-cheat but does use many of the same techniques as kernel-mode anticheat.

jsheard 4 days ago

> I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux.

That's no secret, but the catch is that the Linux version is much, much easier to bypass. That's why some developers choose not to enable it, or in the case of Apex Legends, enabled it but later backtracked and disabled it again.

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Draiken 4 days ago

> That's why some developers choose not to enable it
That's an excuse. It's mostly incompetence or more often than not the company doesn't think it's worth the effort. With more Linux users, the balance will eventually shift from "fuck them" to "we have to figure out a way".

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- johnnyanmac 4 days ago
  
  Well yeah, it always comes down to money. Even on an indie level Linux support is a commitment.
  https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/e2ww5s/mike_rose_linux...
  Now if you do care about quality, having a committed, technical audience giving quality big reports is a godsend. But that's not where we are this decade rife with layoffs and rampant outsourcing in the industry.
  
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  deaddodo 4 days ago
  
  You’re posting an argument from 6 years ago. Not including Steam OS, the Linux market share has almost quadrupled since then (to ~3.2%); including Steam OS, it’s up to ~24%. And continues to trend upwards.
  You also don’t need to arbitrarily support Linux. It’s not difficult to say “this has only been tested on Fedora, Ubuntu, POP, and SteamOS; other distributions are unsupported officially”.
  
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  simoncion 4 days ago
  
  > You also don’t need to arbitrarily support Linux.
  Right. The most one needs to do is to support Proton and let Valve sort the rest out.
  
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- int_19h 4 days ago
  
  Kernel-level anti-cheats are considerably more complicated to make for Linux for obvious reasons like lack of ABI stability in kernel space.
  
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  Draiken 2 days ago
  
  Most game studios pay someone else to make the anti-cheats and many already have Linux versions that the studios choose to not enable.
  Besides, if your anti-cheat only ever looks at the system level, it'll easily be bypassed by hardware cheats. At some point I think anti-cheats will have to "know" the game to be able to detect anomalies. It's the only way to effectively stop many categories of cheats.
  
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  int_19h 19 hours ago
  
  Those Linux versions are generally not kernel-level. Do you know of any that are?
  And yes, of course it's not fool-proof. It's not supposed to be. It's about probabilities: for a given online game, what is the chance that I end up in a match with someone who is obviously cheating and using that to ruin the game for everyone else? The harder you make cheating, the lower that is.
  
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simoncion 4 days ago

> ...but the catch is that the Linux version is much, much easier to bypass.
Shrug. Rumor has it that the Windows version is already fairly trivial to bypass.

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- dleslie 4 days ago
  
  Oh, it absolutely is; if your product doesn't update its EAC bits regularly then it may as well not use EAC at all. Even still, there are known ways around it.
  
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