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  • Hacker News
  • Vote with your wallet on this one. It’s time gaming companies start supporting Linux.
    by cloudie78
  • These are the same dicks that want my kids to create dedicated Ubisoft accounts just to be able to use the PS5 games they've paid for. Never buying anything from these scammers again.
    by drcongo
  • That's the caveat of Proton. Running games on unsupported platforms they are not meant for. And if it doesn't work who's fault that? Valve? The dev? No one because it's open source so fix your own?

    Honestly Valve should have a stricter warning if a game is Windows only

    by unpopularopp
  • >Honestly Valve should have a stricter warning if a game is Windows only

    the "system requirements" section is right there, with "OS" being the first line. i dont agree that this is a valve thing.

    by john_strinlai
  • At Valve's scale, it becomes the publisher's problem. Which is, in this particular case, a good thing imo. I certainly don't mind the pressure on publishers to ensure basic compatibility with Linux
    by Valodim
  • The situation here isn't that the game doesn't work. It does work, it's just the Ubisoft isn't happy with the quality of Easy Anti Cheat's (their third party anti cheat provider) Linux offering.
    by bogwog
  • I stopped buying Ubisoft games a long time ago for several other reasons
    by bakies
  • This article just made me think "wait, people still buy Ubisoft after everything they pulled in the past 15+ years?"
    by rf15
  • There's a couple different ways to look at this. From a charitable point of view to ubisoft, they do not advertise support for Linux. Instead they openly state it's a window's only game. So when a third party (i.e. Valve) makes shim that grants linux functionality, it's not really on Ubisoft to maintain that.

    However, from a consumer perspective, this is incredibly frustrating. The average person does not think of "linux vs. windows". They just bought the steam deck and when they bought For Honor it was sold on that "platform". Again, it's hard to blame Ubisoft for this conundrum since they were never necessarily trying to be steam deck compliant to begin with, but it definitely feels wrong to take the game away from a player in this perspective.

    All that being said, historically across many games such as Rust, many are quick to blame linux for cheating, but pragmatically banning linux has yet to measurably reduce the amount of cheating that players report experiencing, so I don't agree with the decision at all. It's a footgun disguised as a band aid

    by scronkfinkle
  • > So when a third party (i.e. Valve) makes shim that grants linux functionality, it's not really on Ubisoft to maintain that.

    I agree that it's not on them to maintain it, but that's different from intentionally breaking it.

    by yjftsjthsd-h
  • Client-side anti-cheat is a band-aid that will always punish legit players and merely hinder cheaters.

    'The client cannot be trusted' applies to simple HTTP exchanges as well as to game state.

    Of course, if the server has to track and validate everything, it would cost more to operate game servers....

    by einrealist
  • This is a solved problem with dedicated servers and a proper community. They're just trying to sell you One Faceless Corp Server because it makes them more money, even though it is less efficient because of scaling problems and also you have less control.

    This is "It works better in the app" applied to gaming services.

    by rf15
  • When you though Ubisoft can't get any worse...
    by vsviridov
  • I bought Farcry 3 Blood Dragon some years ago. I seem to recall I had to install some kind of mod otherwise the game would hang on startup or had long delays because the installed version tried to communicate with some long dead Ubisoft gaming service that they'd shut down the servers for years ago. Funny they were still willing to collect the money for the game that they no longer supported.
    by deltoidmaximus
  • I've gotten very comfortable not owning Ubisoft games[1].

    [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-t...

    by AlexandrB
  • I recently moved to Linux for gaming. Last time I tried was around 2008 and I guess I was reluctant to move gaming to Linux because that experience was far from smooth.

    Honestly, it's like magic that I can run "The Finals" on highest settings without any hiccup. It literally 'just works'. Happy that I could completely get rid of Windows (it was only there for gaming). It's still hard to believe, given back in 2008 when playing CS I had framerate bugs, text would not render properly (even after messing around with it for some days), and mouse input was.. not ideal. It's come a long way since the days of WINE.

    FWIW, I moved from Debian to "Nobara Linux" for this. Mostly because I was in the mood for some distro hopping as well. Highly recommend the experience. (https://nobaraproject.org/). It was a smooth experience from the start, no issues installing it, drivers worked out-of-the-box, audio settings all worked fine, and Steam was pre-installed as well. Super cool.

    Would not move back to Windows gaming for Ubisoft games lol.

    by Insanity
  • Which distro are you using? I'm currently on bazzite and it's merely an okay experience.
    by stackghost
  • I too have been distro hopping, loading up Claude has made it extremely easy to be comfortable in exploring other distros
    by alanwreath
  • Going forward, I simply will not be purchasing any game that does not work on Linux. I realize that I'll be missing out on some titles, but Windows simply isn't worth the headache. CachyOS has been working great for me. Proton has been amazing. I have had zero problems with the games I typically play -- some of which are multiplayer. Luckily, I have not run into anti-cheat issues yet.
    by Ithildin
  • I've been in the same boat, but with mac. I'm tired of keeping a windows machine around just to play a few games.

    Using a Windows 11 machine stirs up some old trauma I try to forget.

    by bigbuppo
  • I'm pulling for Microsoft to create an XboxOS for PC you can just freely install on any machine, as that's about the only thing I care about regarding Windows. Then I could see myself dualbooting that when I want to play my Xbox collection. And it'd be nice to build a beefy machine to max them out on, once the PC component prices settle a bit.

    They're playing with that with the Xbox Full Screen Experience on ROG Xbox Ally, but it's still running Windows 11 underneath. I just want the Xbox.

    by mihaelm
  • Same.

    There are obviously few or no hard technical blockers preventing Valve and the Linux community from supporting any game that runs on Windows, unless it's been specifically engineered to block Linux, and publishers of those games will simply not be getting my money anymore. If Windows was still as pleasant and non-invasive as eg KDE Plasma on Cachy, it would be a different story, but I haven't used it in months (previously I did my desktop gaming in a windows VM) and the feeling of relief is almost tangible. Windows 11 is _so fucking bad_.

    I understand that there may be some semi-legitimate arguments around anticheat, but a) not my problem, and b) back in the day we dealt with cheaters by having a persistent dedicated server community with admins ready to kick or ban. The publishers took that away from us.

    by caconym_
  • This stuff should only be legal if companies are forced to return you the full purchase price of the game.
    by jorvi
  • But they are not selling the game for Linux. Only for Windows. It's another story that it works because of Proton but technically they don't support the platform at all.

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/304390/FOR_HONOR/

    https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/help/for-honor/article/system-...

    by thrownawaysz
  • Someone in EU should try to make a complaint to the local authority who is enforcing ePrivacy Directive regarding anti cheats in general. Despite what people think ePD isn't limited to cookies and rather also applies all data read or stored in "terminal equipment" via use of electronic communications networks. I would say anti cheat should usually qualify. If they want to do it without consent then they need to show that it's strictly necessary for the service user specifically requested (and that applies for each piece of data written/read, including the OS information).

    There's good argument that anti cheat itself would need to be consent based. If you don't accept then you simply don't get placed in games with users who have it enabled.

    by buzer
  • For anyone pursuing this, consider that the EU age verification apps are the EU’s first foray into digital anti-cheat systems at population scale. If you take the time to research how those are being designed and implemented and incorporate awareness of their work into your complaint about anti-cheats in gaming, your missive will be a lot more likely to strike the target and be taken seriously.
    by altairprime
  • This is funny since they are literally using "Easy Anti Cheat" and that fully supports Linux.

    From what I understand Easy Anti Cheat, makes it very easy for developers to run on Linux, basically it is a compile setting to support it. It is one of the anti-cheat providers that had decent Linux support since the beginning.

    Back before Proton and when it was new developers often denied requests for turning on Linux support, however this is the first time I head a developer actively turning it off.

    I think it speaks volumes of their intent that the game is to be "fully removed from the Linux platform", and they won't offer the single player experience or non competitive experience for Linux based customers.

    On top of that it seems to me they tried sneaking this statement in an announcement titled "Ranked FAQ". This shows they have no respect for their customers.

    https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/platform...

    by trashb
  • Microsoft is probably paying companies to not support linux. This looks no different than any other paid exclusivity.
    by roosterIllusi0n
  • EAC supports Linux, but by doing so you're disabling a number of security features since you're making the anti-cheat run entirely in userspace.

    Remember these games aren't Linux native either, so it allows Windows-using cheaters to lie to the process that they're on Linux and to only use userspace protection. The cheat then runs in kernel space and remains invisible.

    The only realistic way to solve this on Linux is enforcing secure boot w/trusted kernels and then running the anti-cheat in sandboxed eBPF kernel space. Embark is looking at this approach.

    by tapoxi
  • Because EAC and other anti cheat offer basically no protection on Linux, basically anyone can vibe code an undetectable cheat. The situation on Windows isn't exactly great but it funnel cheat creators into a few methods that can be detected.

    Apex is another game that also disabled it.

    by Hikikomori