GamesBattle RoyaleApex LegendsApex Legends ditches Steam Deck support: EA says Linux is ‘a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesBattle RoyaleApex LegendsApex Legends ditches Steam Deck support: EA says Linux is ‘a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Electronic Arts)
Bad news, Steam Deck shooters: Electronic Arts has determined that Linux is “a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats” in Apex Legends, and it has thus decided toblock anyone using the OSfrom accessing the game.
“The openness of the Linux operating systems makes it an attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers,” the Apex anticheat team wrote in an update explaining its decision.
“Linux cheats are indeed harder to detect and the data shows that they are growing at a rate that requires an outsized level of focus and attention from the team for a relatively small platform. There are also cases in which cheats for the Windows OS get emulated as if it’s on Linux in order to increase the difficulty of detection and prevention.”
Cutting off an entire branch of players is no small thing, but the anticheat team said it had to balance the “greater health” of the overall Apex player base with the number of legitimate players on Linux. “While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games,” it wrote.
(Image credit: Electronic Arts)
The update doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts of why Linux is such a popular vector for cheating, or why cheats on Linux are so hard to detect, but it seems to come down to kernel mode anticheats being easy to work around in the Linux environment. “There is currently no reliable way for us to differentiate a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious cheat claiming to be a Steam Deck (via Linux),” the anticheat team wrote.
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“Even allowing emulation is an exceptionally dangerous game, as many cheats could then just run on the host, manipulating or analyzing the VM in a way that would be invisible to Vanguard within it,” Riot wrote.
The big question is what sort of impact this will have on cheating in Apex Legends going forward, and several players have called on EA to share before/after numbers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the move, or lack thereof as the case may be; some are also no doubt hoping for a walkback if blocking Linux players proves to have little or no effect. For now, though, it’s a done deal: If you want to keep playing Apex Legends on your Steam Deck, you’re going to have toinstall windows.
TOPICSElectronic Arts
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