Recently a game called “The Finals” has released and after their beta was over they stopped supporting Linux, and a lot of people are clearly pissed and have sparked a ton of debates within their Discord server but I constantly and constantly see an argument brought up by Windows users in the community saying that they dont want Linux support and argue that enabling Linux support is only going to add more cheaters into the game. (as its a pretty big problem right now even though they’re using EAC.)
I don’t believe it, I haven’t seen any proof of it, but I wanted to ask you guys what your thoughts are on it. And, if you have some sort of source proving whether or not this is the case, please do share.
I grew up as a web developer, and one of the things they hammer home to you is to never trust the client. The end user can tweak and modify their web browser and send data that is invalid or even malicious.
Instead, you’re supposed to validate everything the client sent you when you receive it. To always consider the client hostile, and check that what it wants to do is sensible.
It’s a shame to see the opposite of that mindset from these game studios. They want to ensure that the client is as trustworthy as possible using invasive techniques and trying to restrict people’s ability to use their own computers.
Which sounds fine on paper, but doesn’t really work. Until we live in the world that Microsoft wants where we are only allowed to use software officially signed and approved by Microsoft, people can still run arbitrary code on their devices.
Anticheat binaries can be modified and tanpered with to ignore things. Network traffic can be intercepted. The game could run in a virtual machine with a modified cpu.
It’s annoying to me that these big companies have managed to shift the narrative so effectively to what is effectively the PC equivalent to confiscating water bottles at aorports to give the illusion that they are stopping terrorists.
Google actually tried to push an “anticheat” for Chrome (as far as I know they failed because they didn’t have enough market share to force things). This would allow websites to require you to use Chrome with no extendions.
If that had gone through, I wonder how many people would be mad that they wouldn’t be able to play browser shooters on Firefox or other Chromium based browsers? Would we have these same kinds of posts where people were arguing over whether Firefox “has more cheaters”?
The important question to ask isn’t “would Linux allow more cheaters?”, it’s “why isn’t the modern games industry actually doing anything to stop cheaters?”.
TL;DR - Yes, and companies should fix this by catching cheaters on the server, not the game client. Client-side cheat detection will always have gaps.
Server-side cheat detection is a lot harder than integrating an off-the-shelf cheat detection engine since it needs game-specific logic and likely more moderators to determine the difference between a cheater and a high performing player. It also requires more server resources, which also has ongoing costs.
Client-side anti-cheat is “good enough” for most studios, so they can get away with it. It’s also often cheaper to not support a niche platform if the missed sales are likely less than the cost of ongoing support (or the opportunity cost of other lucrative projects).
I think that’s really important to understand, especially when it comes to larger games like Fortnite supporting Linux, especially since most of those potential Linux users are likely already playing on Windows, console, or mobile. The profit is low, and the risks make it a hard business choice to defend. It’s still stupid, but it likely makes sense from a business perspective.
amazingly well said, thank you