We can probably say a final goodbye to Roblox on Linux with Wine soon

After Roblox recently introduced Hyperion anti-tamper, there were some issues running it on Linux, but there's been workarounds and some of the Roblox staff made it to work on Linux with Wine again, but it seems not for much longer.

This ongoing saga of Roblox working, then not working, then working again and so on looks like it's about to end and not in a good way for people playing it on Linux with Wine. The info comes from the Roblox developer forum (login required), spread across a few posts in the topic "Why isn’t Hyperion an anti-cheat?".

Roblox staff member Bitdancer once again answering lots of questions, and then this was noted:

We have a similar issue with our unofficial Wine support. We see it being used for cheating, which is heartbreaking, to be honest, as this was a personal effort of our developers under the assumption that folks out there would understand and not misuse it.

In reply to a user asking if "Roblox on Linux is likely not gonna last much longer?", Bitdancer replied:

I am very sorry, but you are correct. Unfortunately, we have exhausted our options.

Further expanding on the why:

Wine is an excellent tool for reverse engineering. Additionally, we had to disable many antitamper checks to make Hyperion run on Wine. This has allowed interested parties to learn a lot about the internal workings of Hyperion, relevant to both Win32 and UWP. As the initial shock of Hyperion’s release started wearing off, many people have begun discovering the various angles through which one can learn more about the inner workings of Hyperion. Apparently, many have done just that, necessitating us to become more strict.

Continuing across another post:

The reason I gave above is one, rather significant, reason but not the only one. There have been many contributing factors. For example, the increased detection of cheating on Wine, the floundering of Wine-based Roblox exploits on different Discord servers, and the question of maintainability. Hyperion is a complex piece of software; we introduced more than one bug in Hyperion because we wanted to make something work on Wine. Ultimately, every responsible company must ask whether it is worth the effort. Who is responsible when things go wrong? What does unofficial support really mean? How many users of other platforms will be inconvenienced by our decision to support Wine? How can we make features such as kernel components work, and so much more.

As they explained in the quotes above, it doesn't necessarily mean Linux players specifically are the ones actually cheating, but the way they enabled it to work has allowed cheat makers to look a bit more behind the scenes to enable cheats even on Windows.

So, if you are playing it on Linux, or you were wanting to, it certainly sounds like it will be entirely blocked at some point. A shame, considering how massive a platform Roblox is. It's good to see their team be so clear and open about the issues though, rather than just blocking it and not giving an answer like plenty of other games do.