Irdeto, the company behind Denuvo and the newer Denuvo Anti-Cheat have announced that developers on Steam can now get direct anti-cheat integration through Steamworks. Denuvo is one of the most popular DRM solutions, with it often appearing in Windows releases of popular AAA games. Now with this Anti-Cheat easily available direct through Steam no doubt many developers will look to use it.
The question is: how will this affect Linux compatibility of games both native Linux builds and Windows games run through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer? Back in May, we reported that the Denuvo team did mention they were aiming for support of Proton.
After shooting a message over to Irdeto here's what Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto, said in reply:
We can confirm that future deployments of Denuvo Anti-Cheat will not prohibit Linux users from accessing single-player and non-competitive multiplayer features of their games. For example, campaigns or custom multiplayer game matches. Linux users will not be required to install a kernel-mode driver, and the lack of anti-cheat software will not prevent their game from starting.
Even though there is no kernel-mode driver on Linux, the userspace game process performs significant cheat detection. Linux users accessing multiplayer will be reported to online services as running at lower integrity. Some game developers may choose to prevent Linux users from accessing ranked or competitive game modes. We'll do our best to convince developers and publishers to allow Linux users to participate in competitive modes. Still, we must be honest with them and disclose our reduced detection capability on Linux.
We'll communicate concrete plans for growing Linux detection capability and how the community can contribute as our userbase grows.
In a further clarification to us, we asked if this was only for Windows games in the Proton compatibility layer or if it will have the same kind of support for native Linux builds to which they replied "This is for Windows games in Proton".
When asked for their plans (if any) to support native Linux builds of games, here's what they said:
We have not yet been engaged by an organization expressing interest in native anti-cheat support for Linux. Once there is demand, we’d have no hesitation to take on that task. It’s worth noting that we’ve had anti-cheat technology on consoles for many years now. Our experience with Linux-like environments on the Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation 4 & 5 indicates that effective native Linux anti-cheat would require a from-the-ground-up effort and not just a port. Denuvo Anti-Cheat is heavily dependent on hardware security features which makes it fairly kernel-agnostic, so it’s just a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. Our best bang-for-the-buck in the short term is Proton.
So there you have it. If demand comes, they will do it too and it's only a matter of time. Nice to see them being so open about it and happy to chat with us on it so clearly.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: BielFPsIt's sad how anti cheat solutions are more effective to block legit Linux players instead of actual cheaters. And for anti-piracy protection, I haven't see any successfully case with Denuvo since the Chinese had their first success of crack them.
Reading the article, my thoughts are that it will be similar to EAC situation: It kinda works with Linux, but the developer has to choose if they want to support it, which the answer is no.
80% of the sales of an game used to happen in the first 2 months after its relase.
denuvo can keep an game from being pirated for more time than this.
https://crackwatch.com/
not to mention that the cheating industry move millions if not billions of dollars each year, that is more than the linux gaming industry (aside from android)
Last edited by elmapul on 19 January 2021 at 8:27 pm UTC
Anti cheat stuff only bother legit players, cheaters know how to bypass antiz.
Quoting: elmapuli think we should let the fight against drm with the windows users, while we fight for linux marketshare, we can join they in their fight later on, but we dont have enough people/resources to fight in both fronts at the same time run today, live to fight tomorrow.The thing is, if I was of the mindset that was okay with DRM solutions, I would not be using Linux in the first place. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: elmapulepic games "fighting against exclusivity" and monopolization of pc games.
That's a strange one, given Epic are signing exclusive contracts. They are on the wrong side of things.
No it is a funny one, isn't it.
They have humor, if they say things like that.
ShinyaOsen Jan 19, 2021
Quoting: Zlopezat least there are legal options for games, not like for movies or musicI always forget how hard it can be to get DRM free music im so used to buying from bandcamp and japan and my dad buys classical music. Japan still has a CD market and have multiple DRM free digital stores some times you do need to vpn to be able to buy the music. Movie on the other had ya good luck trying to get a DRM free version in good quality legaly since Bluray's DRM hasnt been fully cracked like DVD.
Quoting: ShinyaOsenQuoting: Zlopezat least there are legal options for games, not like for movies or musicI always forget how hard it can be to get DRM free music im so used to buying from bandcamp and japan and my dad buys classical music. Japan still has a CD market and have multiple DRM free digital stores some times you do need to vpn to be able to buy the music. Movie on the other had ya good luck trying to get a DRM free version in good quality legaly since Bluray's DRM hasnt been fully cracked like DVD.
I thought DRM-free music situation isn't bad. There are a number of good stores where you can get even DRM-free FLAC:
* https://bandcamp.com
* https://us.7digital.com
* https://uk.7digital.com
* https://www.junodownload.com
* https://store.tidal.com
* https://www.prestomusic.com
* https://www.prostudiomasters.com
* https://www.hdtracks.com
* https://www.jamendo.com
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: elmapulthere is no perfect solution for anti cheat.
That's why you don't need a perfect one. You need one that's good enough. And it should never be a privacy and security horror rootkit running on the client side.
o think you dont understand what i mean.
by perfect i mean "good enough", hackers will always find an way to break the anti cheat protection, its runing on your machine after all so you are in control.
what an anti cheat solution can do is, at best, delay the time that the hackers will take to break the anti cheat mechanism, delay it not forever, but for long enough to find another solution, so as soon as its broken, they implement the new solution, its an endless battle.
the biggest issue is that there is no decent way to do it in an non intrusive manner.
think about that:
what is anti cheat or drm after all? an software that try to stop you from doing whetever you want with the machine, eg: faking inputs etc.
what is free software trying to do? the opposite, atempting to make you have full control of the computer.
there is no way that those 2 things can walk togheter, its impossible to do an good open source drm solution or open source anti cheat solution.
and not all games can run server side only, what about those button mash mini games where the player who presses the button faster wins? its impossible to secure the input against hacking.
we cant expect companies to do something impossible.
if you think there is an silver bullet to solve all those problems at the same time, present this magic solution to the companies, if it was easy they would already have figured it out, what youre demanding is simply impossible.
the anti cheat solutions arent intrusive nowadays because companies want then to, then are because that was the only solution possible.
Quoting: elmapulby perfect i mean "good enough", hackers will always find an way to break the anti cheat protection, its runing on your machine after all so you are in control.
I meant good enough to make the game enjoyable. If someone "breaks" it in a way that doesn't ruin the game, why should anyone care? AI on the server side can be gradually improved to catch robotic or unnatural behavior of cheaters. That's more than enough for it. But AI needs investment and a lot of work to get right. Making a rootkit on the client side is an easier no brainer and unscrupulous companies obviously choose that. I don't see any excuse for that besides basic greed.
Last edited by Shmerl on 20 January 2021 at 1:30 am UTC
Quoting: Shmerlvalve did an talk about this topic, you should take a look at it.Quoting: elmapulby perfect i mean "good enough", hackers will always find an way to break the anti cheat protection, its runing on your machine after all so you are in control.
I meant good enough to make the game enjoyable. If someone "breaks" it in a way that doesn't ruin the game, why should anyone care? AI on the server side can be gradually improved to catch robotic or unnatural behavior of cheaters. That's more than enough for it. But AI needs investment and a lot of work to get right. Making a rootkit on the client side is an easier no brainer and unscrupulous companies obviously choose that. I don't see any excuse for that besides basic greed.
Quoting: Shmerllike it or not, this strategy fucking works.Quoting: elmapulaccording to then, they would stop it, if valve reduces their cut to 12%, wich didnt happened
Well, I don't buy the argument of using anti-competitive methods by those who claim they are advancing competition. It's bunk.
and we have exclusives at linux too, the difference is, we make exclusives by the lack of standards.
often you see an program that only works on ubuntu or only works on redhat because its hard to suport all those distros.
so what the distro mantainers do? they join in an effort like w3c and khronos group to create an standard that will allow you to write an program only once and run on all the distros?
pff, nope, they fragment it even more, no incentive to cooperate.
hell, the fact that we have snaps, flatpaks and appimages kinda of proves that.
and the fact that some distros like mint found excuses to not support snaps and went out of their way to make sure you cant install snaps on mint, proves it again.
sure they said it was proprietary or something like that, but guess what? steam is too, and they support it.
the distro mantainers fight each other in what package manager they use, meanwhile more and more developers start to ignoring then and distribute their softwares and games on steam instead.
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