Back in October 2024, Respawn announced they were blocking Apex Legends on Linux platforms (including Steam Deck). Apparently this has worked quite well for them.
In the latest Apex Legends: Takeover Dev Update video on YouTube they went over various details on what they're doing to improve the game. Steven Ferreira, Game Director on Apex Legends, mentions in the video at about 2 minutes in: "A couple of months ago we blocked Linux access to Apex. And we are pleased to report that we've seen a meaningful reduction in the amount of cheating recently."
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Back in early December 2024, they also made a post on X/Twitter to show a continued reduction in cheating:
Does this mean Linux users / players are cheaters or cheat more than players on other platforms? Well, no. The issue is mainly that cheat makers like to run their exploits on Linux whenever they can, so blocking Linux as a platform is the easiest and bluntest tool game developers have to combat the problem. On Windows, they have kernel-level access for their anti-cheat that they don't have on Linux as well (although the benefit of that is debatable).
The same situation happened with survival game Rust, as noted by developer Alistair McFarlane back in 2022:
When we discontinued linux support in 2019, one of the core reasons was how the cheating community was exploiting the Linux platform. That's not to say that cheating was super widespread on Linux, but it was safer for cheat developers.
Presumably that's why GTA Online was blocked as well even though it also uses anti-cheat that supports Linux.
Anti-cheat is just going to remain an issue for Linux gaming for a long time it seems, until we see more Steam Decks getting sold and regularly used, along with SteamOS expanding onto more devices. It's going to be the big elephant in the room if Valve did build a living room Steam Console.
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Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I suppose that's possible, but you wouldn't be able to distinguish the difference between "known cheater numbers dropping" and "cheater numbers dropping".
It also seems like the cheating was heading downward already if you judge it by the chart. It’s hard to say how big the effect of the block really was, it seem to have made it spiral down more trastic after Linux block, but would the chart data slowly head there anyway.
we've seen a meaningful reduction in the amount of cheating recently.Fair.
But until that phrase reads "we totally, positively eliminated all cheating in our game", then it's just smoke and mirrors.
It means that even with their best ring-0 kernel anticheat, cheaters are NOT completely eliminated. And if even a single system works to defeat deep anticheat techniques, it means the shallow anticheats are good enough.
80/20 and how to teach them to software developers.
"Well done! But hey, where are all the players?"
"Oh, those are gone, too..."
pleasereadthemanual 7 hours ago
If it did have an effect, it didn't stop cheaters in their tracks. It was hardly a death blow. Given another 2-3 months, cheating will be back where it was before Linux was banned based on the trend line.
I'm inclined to believe them when they say banning Linux had a reduction in cheaters. It just makes sense. All you can do is make cheating harder rather than eliminate it outright—not even Valorant can stop all cheating.
I hear all the time that CS2 has a lot of cheaters and that game relies on server-side anti-cheat. But I don't know, because I don't play the game.
I play Siege regularly, which has never enabled Linux, and it's the only game where I've seen widespread cheating. Every other match, someone else has walls or aimbot. That game has two anti-cheat systems! Siege has roughly half the players of Apex Legends at the moment.
Banning Linux is an easy thing to do to reduce cheating, but it's hardly going to make a dent. It's a good start, but for the sake of Apex players, one would hope they've got other things up their sleeve than this incredibly blunt approach...
Maybe in the future, competitive games will only be allowed to be played on Cloud gaming systems like xCloud and GeForce Now... I wouldn't mind that so long as the prices weren't as expensive as they are now.
Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 5 Feb 2025 at 11:05 pm UTC
Pretty lame reasons to exclude a platform wholesale and pretending that the fault lies there, especially since it feels at best a temporary solution.
There's simply not enough data points to claim anything beyond a natural variability in numbers, which one doesn't need a graph for to know that it is there.
Even assuming it did tell anything relevant and there was a causal relation: we're seeing the numbers well on the way to creeping right back up to the old level as cheaters (and the providers of their tools) would seem to be adapting to the new windows-only environment.
Then there's the big elephant in the room: given the processing power of mid-range, soon also low-end, phones, cheating methods are going to be moving off-pc entirely (aim phone's camera to monitor, connect phone to special controller), making kernel-level anti-cheat methods look about as relevant as the Maginot line.
Last edited by emphy on 6 Feb 2025 at 12:47 am UTC
I wonder if the meaningful reduction in cheating activity was actually because of their reduction in the playerbase in general...well, maybe they should shutdown their servers next time, no one can cheat if no one can play
Cloversheen 35 minutes ago
There is also only 4 weekend days within that range discounting any special holidays.
None of this seems particularly exciting especially when you also consider the player count trend during the same period: https://steamdb.info/app/1172470/charts/#1y
Seems like normal corporate face saving to investors to me.
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