Even though Epic Games announced recently how they expanded support for Easy Anti-Cheat to have full support of native Linux, plus Wine / Proton (and so the Steam Deck), it seems it's not as easy as we hoped.
In the original announcement, Epic mentioned how it can be enabled with "a few clicks in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal" but the situation is never that simple. A developer of Warhammer: Vermintide 2 has written a post on Steam to explain, noting that there are two versions of EAC. There's the original and the newer version used via Epic Online Services. The majority of games are likely still with the old version, since the newer one needs SDK upgrades and newer integrations.
We already knew that developers needed the latest SDK from the original announcement, but this makes it simpler for us all to understand.
Here's what they said:
One part we already know not to be true, is a requirement of Epic Online Services authentication, as the developers of Brawlhalla showed in their own testing with the new integration which worked without users touching Epic's services directly. The other point remains though, as developers won't upgrade from the older implementation to the newer without a good reason, due to extra work involved when the older one is still getting the latest EAC updates as normal (as confirmed in a later post). Although, there may come a time Epic force EOS for it, but it stands to reason they haven't currently as it would have been a big upheaval for so many developers using it and likely caused plenty of developer backlash there.
Tripwire Interactive also hinted towards the exact same thing, when asked about hooking up support for
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, a developer noted back in September 2021, "The version of EAC used on RS 2 is not the version that is advertised in this, and it is not something that will work for RS 2 players.".
Hopefully the actual work involved in moving from old EAC to new isn't too much, but it's a reason why we've yet to see any really look to do it. Once the Steam Deck is out though, it should improve, if enough players ask developers to get it sorted, otherwise players may have to resort to a manual install of Windows on the Steam Deck instead of SteamOS 3 to play some of the most popular multiplayer titles.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: ArdjeSo Epic actually uses the steam deck to force users to get an epic online account.
I think this shows why EAC is evil.
You need to read the whole article.
Edit: And so he did, later. :)
Last edited by Beamboom on 9 January 2022 at 10:53 am UTC
I had no idea about the two EAC versions though. So thanks to these devs for clarifying that. And I'm very curious if something more is going to be done with this.
rustybroomhandle Jan 9, 2022
Quoting: EhvisI had no idea about the two EAC versions though. So thanks to these devs for clarifying that. And I'm very curious if something more is going to be done with this.
So for the one version of EAC it literally is just an SDK update and then a "few clicks", but nobody seems to have bothered to mention that there's an entirely other version of EAC that is used by a most current games that is completely unsupported. I do suspect that EAC will eventually be deprecating the non-EOS version though as keeping two codebases up to date seems like an unnecessary waste of resources.
Epic is no saint and definitively wants to profit from it.
What kind of horrible people are they!?!?
Quoting: JoshuaAshtonThere's no reason for this game to have anti-cheat in the first place, it's a coop game. :/
There is no reason for any game to use an anti-cheat in the first place if it is thought from scratch and build around that idea but it is way cheaper/easier to use third party SDK, engine, netcode or whatever to take care of everything even if it doesn't work well.
I you play a little bit of CS:GO (with VAC) for example, it is completely useless against cheaters.
rustybroomhandle Jan 9, 2022
Quoting: GuestIt's actually quite a bit more of market share than they are giving it credit for. If they support Proton/Wine, it allows anyone with Wine to play their game. This includes but isn't limited to, x86/ARM Linux, FreeBSD, x86 OSX, ARM OSX, and so on.
And Amazon will soon be using Proton on their streaming service too.
rustybroomhandle Jan 9, 2022
Quoting: Guestthere are a couple of games on Stadia using Proton as well.
Small correction. No games on Stadia use Proton, but it is possible that some use dxvk/vkd3d native.
Quoting: GuestI'm simply pointing out it's disingenuous for one dev to put all the blame on Epic here, they're not the one's relying on Proton.
The blame is on the "one click away" choice of words.
With those words they created a lot of expectation from his players and now he has to go on steam and explain that not only one click away means integrate a different library into the game, it will also require an EULA update for EOS (or at the very least some lawyer work to understand if this is the case).
Last edited by Lofty on 9 January 2022 at 3:46 pm UTC
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So the "just a few clicks" statement made in the original announcement wasn't entirely accurate, and would only apply to titles using the EOS version of EAC, which simply hasn't been many games aside from either pretty new ones, and likely predominantly Epic exclusive titles.
We are still looking at what is or isn't going to be possible, but it's not as easy as it was made out to be -- far from it in fact.
There may be other solutions or workarounds, but ripping out the old EAC and rewriting everything to implement "NuEAC" and potentially asking our entire playerbase to connect through and sign through EOS for an honestly tiny market share that was (and would remain) unsupported from the get go might be a deal breaker.
Time will tell.