2y ago

Linux Gaming: Anti-Cheats question

There are games that we cannot play on Linux because of anticheat, which detects wine/proton translation.

How do I tell the company that produces this game that I am interested in playing it on Linux?

The company behind the game I am interested in does not allow any e-mail contact. The only way to contact them is the ticket system. I sent a ticket that I'd like to play it on Linux, but got only a generic response to follow up on news etc.

Maybe if we flooded them with such tickets, they would finally see that it might be worth considering?

What do you think about it?

23 comments

Say "go fuck yourself lul" into the mirror to save yourself some time.

Best just to boycott those games/companies and play/promote Linux-friendly games.

I don't want to be pessimistic, but I consider that in this scenario (as a Battlefield 2042 player) there are only three possible options:
The company kindly activates Proton/Wine support, but they don't do it because they love their users, they do it because they realized that specifically the Steam Deck has a certain market share that they are losing.
Valve makes an agreement with those companies and with the anticheats and allows us gamers to play from Linux as if it was Windows but not bypassing the anticheat, but implementing some kind of anticheat also for Wine/Proton.
The one I consider most likely, we're screwed and we'll have to wait for some hacker (or experienced users) to figure out how the hell to make the anticheat think we're in Windows when we're really in Wine. It seems to me that this happens with some Wine prefixes that I have no idea make it possible to play LOL on Linux.
- Since they wish to maintain a cheat free environment, perhaps they should stand up a server only for Linux users where the anti-cheat is not required. This way they can serve the Linux community. Players who want to play under Linux will be informed that they play without the benefit of the anti-cheat?
  
  yeah it's a cool solution, but I think that the servers won't be populated much and the matchmaking time will be like 10-15 minutes.
  
  That would be very cool actually. And hell, while they are at it, give us the tools to host the servers on our own and moderate them. IMO this would solve some issues
- Headless capitalistic entities don't love their users.
  Native support or this are the best case scenarios.
  Those workarounds would probably get flagged as cheating by those anti-cheat software, hell, some of these work as literal rootkits. I think Riot/LoL is a special case, they don't directly support it, but also don't treat it as a bannable offense, or something like that.
- They usually patch publically known exploits on their anticheats pretty quick, its what its for.
  I dont think an arms race like that can be sustained by independent unpaid hackers releasing such kind of bypass for us.

This has been an age old battle. Some of them changed their mind, under the pressure of the steam deck, and some didn't. Those who didn't will probably never change it at this point, despite literal hundreds of thousands of forum threads, that are still not stopping.
Your first checkpoint should be here

Maybe if we flooded them with such tickets, they would finally see that it might be worth considering?
I've worked in customer support and most of the time these type of tickets just get a copy pasted response basically saying thanks for your feedback, kindly go fuck yourself.
If you want something that could be reviewed I'd suggest contacting their legal department or even their HR department. The other option is to look for individual employees emails and socials and just message them.
I recommend not doing any of these things though, because it can be quite annoying to deal with these types of requests, as you will likely not be the first person to suggest this.

The support people:
Have no agency over the choices the company makes - a lot of the time they are subcontractors, and have no better access to senior management than you do
Are not told anything that isn't publicly available - even if the company were working on a Linux port, they wouldn't know about it either
Are typically working to a script - tier 1 support people are given a script and a troubleshooting workflow, and are strongly discouraged from going off script - "question: will you bring $game to other platforms. Answer: we have nothing to announce, but keep an eye on our social media account". If you escalate questions that you have the answer to, you aren't going to keep your job for very long (remember subcontractors?)
If you are going to contact support, be polite. Support agents put up with a ton of shit, don't add to it. If you want to make noise, you are probably better off making noise on social media - but be realistic. Bringing a game to a new platform is phenomenally expensive - 7 or 8 figures for a large game. It's not just the port, it's testing, it's updating docs, it's updating support people. That is money someone has to invest up-front, so the people with the money need to know they are going to get a reasonable return on that money compared to building a new game
- Bringing a game to a new platform is phenomenally expensive - 7 or 8 figures for a large game. It’s not just the port, it’s testing, it’s updating docs, it’s updating support people. That is money someone has to invest up-front, so the people with the money need to know they are going to get a reasonable return on that money compared to building a new game
  In this case, it really isn't. The platform they need to support is Windows before and after. No change there.
  The only actual change they need to do is set a setting in their anti-cheat middleware to allow Proton and distribute the required binaries. Obviously a bit of QA that that part actually works.
  The rest is up to WINE/Proton/Valve and supporting systems and 99.9% of that should already work. We as the broader Linux community have full control over those, so there's no further input required from the game dev after that.
  It's maybe 1-2 dev days, perhaps a week. That works out to 3-4 figures, maybe 5. I suspect that'd be offset in the first 5min of even just announcing Linux support.
- Okay, thanks!

Send an email to the CEO, make a post on their forums, anything helps tbh. I disagree with other people saying nothing can be done, because the noise matters when lots of people do it.
There's no standard way, since the standard methods tend to get ignored. But if you make a public thread or ticket, link it in this community and we can upvote it too!

Best you can do is say your piece publicly (eg: their forums) and move on

This might not be what you wanna hear, but accounting for linux in game dev, especially in online games, comes with added costs. For most companies those added costs do not make financial sense, when the linux demographic is so incredibly small (1.63% on steam: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265033/proportion-of-operating-systems-used-on-the-online-gaming-platform-steam/ )
- This isn't about "making the game work", or "adding Linux support". This is about toggling a checkbox to stop explicitly preventing Linux from working.
  The games that already did never faced a massive cheater problem because of it. The games that have stopped development long ago or "don't care about Linux" (without preventing it with anti cheat) were still made playable by Wine and Proton.
  If the developer wants, they can add system info to their ticket system and filter out any Linux tickets. It costs a game developer barely anything to decide to allow Linux users. Linux support costs a lot, but valve, wine, and the community has been putting a lot of effort in so game developers don't have to change anything about their game.

Most big companies have feedback channels for customers on their websites.
What company are you talking about in particular?

Basically, if the problem is the "Easy AntiCheat/EAC", all they need to do is to add 1 line of code for it to run on Linux! If they (game devs) don't wanna do that, play another game, honestly!
- This is the cold, sad truth of Linux.
  Unfortunately, when a company does not meet your standards, the solution is not to give them your money. Not to lower your standards.

I really hate this answer, but it may just make sense to run windows. Paying a proprietary game on a foss system has little benefit. For a truly braindead approach, would running the game in a windows vm satisfy current anti cheat tech?
- Open your narrow mind just a little bit.
  The "truly braindead" approach is what countless people used to do, when you had a couple games you want to play with, but didn't want to reboot. It used to run phenomenally well, until some companies caught up the ways of detecting it. It's not even a circumvention method for anything. If you wanted to cheat, you could cheat anywhere.
  We don't play games on Linux to make a point. We play games on Linux because it's the OS we use.
  
  Lol apologies I was exaggerating for dramatic effect, vms are great for running anything that requires a different os.
  To complete/complicate the thought I was having, I use Linux because it's fun and because it's free. I like that Linux systems let me use the latest software and let me break things and improve the system. Of course I am also a Microsoft hater and don't want to buy extra windows licenses out of spite 😹. I would love to run games on Linux, but for non-foss games I play on my Xbox which runs windows. I was thinking that if you're going to buy a proprietary game, you should plan to buy the system it's built for. In some cases that's windows. For me that just means I'm not buying a game I can't run on an Xbox :/ lol an Xbox one no less.

23 comments