The developers of Apex Legends have announced that they're going to be blocking the game completely on Linux platforms including Steam Deck.
Writing in a post on X / Twitter I'll copy it below:
Hey Legends,
We’re sharing today that Linux (and Steam Deck using Linux) will no longer be able to access Apex Legends.
Our dev team wanted to provide a bit more context into this and share some of the decision-making process that happened along the way. As mentioned in our prior anti-cheat dev blog, competitive integrity is a top priority for our team and there are many ways in which we’re battling cheaters—this is one to add to the list. We remain committed to more regular updates on topics like this and appreciate your continued reports.
Read on to hear from our Anti-Cheat Team.
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What’s happening?
In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we've identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we've decided to block Linux OS access to the game. While this will impact a small number of Apex players, we believe the decision will meaningfully reduce instances of cheating in our game.
Linux is used by default on the Steam Deck. There is currently no reliable way for us to differentiate a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious cheat claiming to be a Steam Deck (via Linux).
Decision making process
The openness of the Linux operating systems makes it an attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers. Linux cheats are indeed harder to detect and the data shows that they are growing at a rate that requires an outsized level of focus and attention from the team for a relatively small platform. There are also cases in which cheats for the Windows OS get emulated as if it’s on Linux in order to increase the difficulty of detection and prevention.
We had to weigh the decision on the number of players who were legitimately playing on Linux/the Steam Deck versus the greater health of the population of players for Apex. While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games. This ultimately brought us to our decision today.
Next steps
To eliminate this cheat vector, we have made the decision to prevent access to the game for Linux users. This means that Apex Legends will be unplayable immediately for those running this operating system. Playing on handhelds, such as the Steam Deck, is still possible if the user opts to install Windows.
To clarify, this will not impact users who play Apex via Steam on Windows (or other supported platforms).
Thanks for everyone’s continual support and we look forward to sharing future anti-cheat updates!
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This is only a part of our ongoing efforts towards Apex’s anti-cheat. We are continually expanding and refining our detection and banning capabilities globally. Keep an eye out for more news to come in the future. Please continue to report cheaters using the designated tools and channels. Your reports are helpful and matter to us and anti-cheat continues to be a top priority for us.
For future updates and the latest info, continue to follow us here or check out the Apex Tracker Trello for bugs or concerns we’re investigating.
Valve are really going to need to do something more about the anti-cheat situation on Linux. We only recently had GTA Online in GTA V blocked (single-player still works). EA also broke the likes of Battlefield 1 and various other multiplayer games as well on Linux / Steam Deck, and I did say it was likely only a matter of time until EA messed with Apex. The list of blocked titles just keeps going like Roblox too — it's just a repeating problem that seems to have no end in sight.
Soon then the official Steam Deck rating from Valve will drop from Playable to Unsupported. Update 18:16 UTC - Valve have now marked it as Unsupported on Steam Deck.
When you try to play on a Linux platform now, you're just given an anti-cheat message. So this is the end of Apex Legends on Linux and Steam Deck.
How much of a loss is it? Well, for Apex fans on Linux platforms it will of course be a big one. However, looking at Valve's own stats, Apex isn't actually in the Top 100 for the last month of most played games on Steam Deck. The past year though? It's number #48 overall.
Oh, and before you suddenly go "but…but Microsoft are banning kernel-level anti-cheat!" — no they're not. Various YouTube videos and other media made headlines about it, but they're wrong which I wrote about before. Even if in some far-away future Microsoft managed to do so, companies will still block Linux directly if they wanted to (and they already do like Roblox!).
In related news, Valve only announced yesterday that Steam store pages will need to properly note what kernel-level anti-cheat they use.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
officernice Nov 1
Quoting: KimyrielleIf these devs wouldn't suck at coding, they would design their games to be cheat-resilient from the ground up, instead of writing vulnerable client-side systems and then try to detect if someone/something is tampering with them at runtime. But hey, it's not that a lot of people having actual talent would want to work for EA, so there is that.
Why don’t you just apply for the role to fix this? I’m sure anyone in the industry will want to hire you to show them how to properly solve this?
A wise man once said “if it was easy, it would have already been done” :)
PC gaming (Windows and Linux) should only support local multiplayer (separate servers like back in the days or something like friends groups only) where cheating is “banned” by social controls because players knows each other and thus no anti cheat software is needed.
Anti-cheat software is very problematic on Windows. I had to install FC25 on a Windows machine, no fun. Also Windows users don’t deserve this..
Quoting: Talon1024This article serves as a good reminder of a significant reason to avoid multiplayer games.If you want Linux to be relevant in gaming one day, these are exactly the games that it needs. Multiplayer games are far (I mean, FAR) more popular than any other games combined. It seems that 2023 was the last great year of Linux, unless some server side anti-cheat appears in a few decades.
Still, stuff like this is only going to hurt Linux in the end. Imagine someone wants to switch away from Windows; then they hear they can't usePhotoshopAffinity Photo; and they can't play games like League of Legends, Fortnite, Roblox, Apex Legends, Valorant, etc.
If we're lucky, Linux users will still be able to play these games via cloud gaming services like GeForce NOW, even if using such services requires a sizable sacrifice in terms of control and privacy.
Quoting: jensI think in the long term global matchmaking should be restricted to fully closed systems like consoles and cloud gaming.The future will be server-side AC and closed OSs, like consoles.
PC gaming (Windows and Linux) should only support local multiplayer (separate servers like back in the days or something like friends groups only) where cheating is “banned” by social controls because players knows each other and thus no anti cheat software is needed.
Anti-cheat software is very problematic on Windows. I had to install FC25 on a Windows machine, no fun. Also Windows users don’t deserve this..
Quoting: officerniceSo.... I guess this means we can soon wave farewell to Titanfall 2 as well.
Titanfall 2 is abandoned, we're good.
vivian-botte Nov 1
Quoting: SalvatosQuoting: Bogomipsif I follow your example, if 2 cheaters disturb a game I would say the game is ruined for all the players involve in that round so maybe 10 times (I have no idea of the player count in a round) then, it disturbs 20 people at a time not everyone that's why you always see the same type of comments imho.Your interpretation of "disturb" seems overly generous. First, even if only one match out of ten puts me up against a cheater, my experience of the game overall will be hampered as that might mean getting paired with cheaters multiple times a week. Second, those games typically have ranking systems and rewards for player performance. If cheaters can easily occupy the top of every leaderboard without skill, it does disrupt the game’s competitive scene for the whole player base and devalues the competition itself.
Well, I play CS2 and I can encounter cheaters daily (in competitive matchmaking) and it sucks (the community is also more and more toxic but I'm still playing after 25 years of CS), but before banning an entire group of legit gamers because it is easy I would like to find a better solution which is hard. Reporting players is working not great but a little and matches are cancelled afterward to maintain ranking.
And again the point is to evaluate the mitigation results, I would be perfectly fine if you tell me that banning a whole group halved the cheater count, I am not even talking about strict player count, ratio would be enough.
Finally, when reward is involved from the start, anticheat strategies should also have been discussed from the start and built in. These days it is more like, we don't care, we have a third party tech (even cheaper when developed in house but still a third party integration) it doesn't work great but is it cheap and we have a marketing argument to tell people "don't worry we have an anticheat system".
Quoting: jensI think in the long term global matchmaking should be restricted to fully closed systems like consoles and cloud gaming.
PC gaming (Windows and Linux) should only support local multiplayer (separate servers like back in the days or something like friends groups only) where cheating is “banned” by social controls because players knows each other and thus no anti cheat software is needed.
Anti-cheat software is very problematic on Windows. I had to install FC25 on a Windows machine, no fun. Also Windows users don’t deserve this..
Why? Are people really that bothered by the occasional cheater? It's a red herring anyway, the anti-cheat makers have to make their money somehow.
For me all of this is very worrying i don't want more DRM pushed down into my system against my will (multimedia stuff and the web is more than enough), I'd rather not have these things on linux in that case.
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