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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I'm going to do a hard disagree here - they don't have to support Linux, just add compatibility in terms of anti-cheat for Linux. Proton is likely good enough to run the game itself but the anti-cheat sees Linux and just craps itself.
They don't even have to provide support - League of Legends runs on Linux if you install the game using community scripts and custom proton, and while the client runs poorly nobody spams the Riot Games support about how the "Linux version" client doesn't work the well because people understand that it's a community effort. Riot themselves have only made a statement saying how they'll try not to break the game for Linux users, and that's pretty much it.
League of Legends is a massively popular game as well, yet Riot barely has to do anything to maintain it on Linux, let community fix issues that come up, let community provide support as it's their tools.
And while I do understand that porting an anti-cheat to be more friendly to another operating system isn't an easy task (such as for Rust, where they tried to make the anti-cheat compatible with Linux but it introduced other issues so it got shelved), I think you're vastly overstating the amount of areas a company has to cover for a game to be playable on Linux.
There's a difference though.
If the game doesn't work for (some or all) Linux users, that's not a big problem from Epic's POV. They'll lose a couple users that wouldn't have been able to play the game without Linux support anyway.
But if the Anticheat faills on Linux, that is a completely different story. Then cheaters would all dual boot over to Linux to cheat all they want. That's now a problem for the whole game's user base and consequently for the publisher as well.
Something as low-level as an Anticheat would have to be rewritten almost from scratch to work on Linux and this one really needs to be tested with every possible permutation of installed relevant software. Because if one combination is found where it doesn't work, you can be sure that the day after every cheater will be running this config.
(Just to check, do you have a background in game development and/or low-level Windows/Linux programming? I got all of that and I can tell you, nothing that looks easy from the outside is actually easy. I think you are vastly underestimating how much work goes into something until it "just works as expected")
Speaking as a former game cheater...
Cheaters are going to cheat. Booting into Linux isn't going to change that.
Anti-cheats just keep the filthy casuals from cheating. A broken anti-cheat on Linux would be fixed pretty quickly.
Sure, but that's dev resources they need to spend on a small market, and they'd suggest need to hire Linux devs or pull from other projects. It's quite likely the math just doesn't add up given the likelihood for profit for other uses of those resources.
I doubt Epic would lose money in it, but they probably wouldn't make as much as other options.
EAC has a check box for Proton compatibility. Battleeye is linux native. All they have to do is check a box, and test to see if they can break it. If they let it out in the works and there's some influx of cheaters, they can check the box again. Halo Infinite, Apex Legends, Smite, Battlebit etc etc were all capable of checking the box and testing.
I suspect Sweenys hesitation over support is caused by a lack of control.
Upgrading EAC in an unreal engine game is trivial, it's basically baked into the engine. They update EAC all the time.