Respawn Entertainment has just dropped Steam Deck native support for their fledgling live service title, Apex Legends.
They shared this statement on Twitter:
“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.”
We’re sure this news may surprise some gamers, who thought that Linux was safe from viruses and malware. Isn’t Linux too hard for hackers to hack? And I thought there was little interest in hacking it?
But as Respawn explained, as an open platform, it’s actually easy to make Linux do what you want. And of course, cheating on Apex Legends is more than enough motivation for hackers to exploit this situation.
So, Respawn has made Apex Legends unplayable on all Linux Oses effective immediately. This change will not affect all Apex Legends players on Windows. If you are playing Apex Legends on Windows via Steam, you aren’t affected. If you have a Steam Deck, you can still play Apex Legends on it, if you install Windows on it and play it that way.
This looks like a wakeup call for Valve, if they care to act on it. Valve can certainly secure their own anti-cheat solutions for their own games on Steam Deck and Steam on Linux. But so many other games have passed on Steam Deck support for this reason.
It isn’t actually unreasonable for Valve to work something out to get anti-cheat running on the Steam Deck. This is the sort of thing that Steam and Steam Deck fans have been making excuses for, but it should have been something they should have been pressured to fix.
No anti-cheat means few, if any, games with online multiplayer features, are likely to come to the Steam Deck now. And this isn’t just an issue with online games; hackers and cheaters may have found other diabolical ways to exploit SteamOS and Linux for multiple ends.
We do hope Valve recognizes the situation for what it is, even if their loyal fans may have made them think otherwise. It’s time to create new solutions for anti-cheat on the Steam Deck, and it’s not something that can wait while they work on other things for the platform, whenever they feel like it.
