Today, Easy Anti-Cheat from Epic Games / Epic Online Services has officially announced a full expansion for Linux including native builds and Wine + Proton. This is big for Linux Gaming and the Steam Deck.
For those who don't know, Epic Games owns Easy Anti-Cheat and earlier this year they made it free for all developers making Windows games. Today this has been expanded to fully support developers doing native Linux games (and macOS too).
Not only that, this is the big one we've been waiting for — they've also expanded Easy Anti-Cheat support officially for the Wine and Steam Play Proton compatibility layers.
Earlier this year, Easy Anti-Cheat for Windows games was made available to all developers, for free. Today, we extend support to Linux and Mac for developers who maintain full native builds of their games for these platforms.
To make it easy for developers to ship their games across PC platforms, support for the Wine and Proton compatibility layers on Linux is included. Starting with the latest SDK release, developers can activate anti-cheat support for Linux via Wine or Proton with just a few clicks in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal.
Sadly it's not an automatic thing for Wine and Proton, as developers do need to actively go and do those "few clicks" but it's a huge step. In the documentation, it says how developers need to "test and activate client module updates for Linux regularly in addition to Windows". Hopefully many developers will go and do it, since it sounds like very little effort on their part. Considering just how many of the most popular games use Easy Anti-Cheat, this is the start of something massive.
Have a favourite Windows game that doesn't work on Linux currently with Proton or Wine? Looks like it's time to politely ask them to hook it up. Just a few of those that would hopefully work if developers update include:
- Apex Legends
- Dead by Daylight
- Fall Guys
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection
- Rust
A good time to remind game developers and readers to ensure you email us news tips, especially if a game enables this to start working so we don't miss it.
I have started a thread on the feedback forum for New World to hopefully get the devs to add the support so all us Linux gamers can join what looks to be a great new title! I am going to add a link to the forum topic, so if anyone else wanting to play New World on Linux wants to add their voice in support, that would be great!
Can we get EAC support enabled?
I have been gaming on Linux exclusively for over 10 years now, and using Linux for almost 25, and am very excited for how well gaming on Linux is growing! You don't even have to be a tech now to get most games working, and many games actually run better on Linux than they do on Windows, thanks to the great work from the DXVK dev team!
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