Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10(gamingonlinux.com) |
Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10(gamingonlinux.com) |
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...
Removing the single player mode from Linux, however, suggests that they’re doing this because any platform without multiplayer is worthless to them, which suggests there must be a ‘skin shop’ in this game that is viewed as the primary revenue generator. That decision is extremely disrespectful — but it’s the same disrespect they might show by not selling the single player game in countries that disallowed predatory loot boxes, for example. I wholeheartedly support naming and shaming that disrespect; here, they’ve mixed it with complaints about cheating to (largely successfully) disguise a cost-benefit analysis as out of their control due to Linux.
Even if it did, you wouldn't stop DMA cheaters from hacking the game. This is the slippery slope we see on Windows with Ring 0 anticheat being defeated with spoofed PCI hardware.
Ubisoft respected my wishes to not play their shitty games by not even supporting my OS of choice.
Apex is another game that also disabled it.
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.
Assuming secure boot, there’s another realistic way, which is to use vendor-signed readonly Linux OS images — not just kernels — that disallow process memory access to root, come with signed kernel drivers, and offer secure attestation support chained to secure boot. Steam Linux and Bazzite could both implement this easily; the former has a fixed hardware target list and the latter is already an ‘all in one’ solution. Since Linux users are generally competent at dual-booting, one would simply dual-boot into the sealed image to play PvP multiplayer games, no eBPF development or maintenance of anti-cheat required. Embark is within their rights to evaluate the workload of supporting DIY unsigned Linux instances through eBPF but doing so would create a viable competitor to an attestation-derived Valve Anti-Cheat for Steam Linux, and so likely inspire the giant in the room to step up and obsolete it.
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.
So in order to store or read data they would need consent. But consent requirements come from GDPR and it's unlikely that this type of consent would be "freely given" given the impact of refusal.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/304390/FOR_HONOR/
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/help/for-honor/article/system-...
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/for-honor/news-updates/6j...
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.
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-t...
Nothing makes more comfortable than not playing Ubisoft games.
'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....
This is "It works better in the app" applied to gaming services.
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
I agree that it's not on them to maintain it, but that's different from intentionally breaking it.
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.
Even sending metadata so the client can use local sprites to render the enemy is hackable, if the end-user knows the coordinates where to render the enemy, it can immediately tell the server that "user aimed at $COORDS and pulled the trigger"...
> "why can we run windows games the way we want and often better than windows?"
its because we can fiddle with anything in the system, from even before the kernel boots up to the software itself.
> "why cant we stop people tampering with their own systems to stop cheating?"
its because we can fiddle with anything in the system, from even before the kernel boots up to the software itself.
but my addendum is:
> I suppose the only good solution is like those "game streaming services": move all the logic to the server and use the client only as a rendering device.
we are in the "dark ages" of AI/computer vision usage and this wouldn’t stop aimbots that are screen readers. Overall the proposal is the "lesser evil" but still quite fucking evil.
Easy Anti cheat works as a software but doesn't work as an anti cheat system.
Looking at the Steam page for this game, there's a "year 10 roadmap" post.
I remember in the old days some games had optional anticheat and there were servers with and without it.
it'd be an additional expense for a very small % of the player base of a 9 year old game.
Really, linux is meant to give you control over the software that runs in your computer. Anti-cheat is inherently about limiting what you can run on your computer. Windows is much more aimed at allowing you opt in to hard limitations.
you're all the worse.
I think it's already more than 0,1% in most popular games online, but I am assuming it would be just unplayable without anticheat.
People are so brain washed that it is essential that here we are, sad companies won't take the option you giving them root access on linux too!
a much better solution would be absolutely no root kit, but players picking "never play with this player gain". done. boardgame.com does this and it is very much perfect and flawless.
You either put some trust into the systems made by other people, or you don't touch computers at all.
different goals, different people involved, different scope of access, different amount of review, different amount of use = different levels of trust
it's either completely and honestly someone not technical missing the point entirely, or more likely trolling.
Ditched them once they required you to use their own launcher. Years before completely replacing Windows with Linux.
Ubisoft is dead to me so why should I retain useless knowledge?
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.
The announcement is a proof that your statement here is incorrect. Ubisoft is not banning Linux because they hate you and your money, but because there's a hard technical blocker to implementing an efficient anti-cheat system on Linux and the cost of overcoming this technical blocker is presumed to be higher than the loss of revenue they're incurring from losing your business.
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.
Using a Windows 11 machine stirs up some old trauma I try to forget.
Definitely lowers the barrier of entry for someone entirely new to Linux as well.
It's still amazing how well gaming on Linux works, but the only reason why I wanted a Steam machine is becasue when a few friends are over, I don't want to spend twenty minutes fiddling with controllers, it kills the mood. I want to turn it on and game immediately.
I'm running this on AMD CPU & GPU (because AMD historically was always better supported than Nvidia). I've not run into any issues the past weeks. Discord and the game both run smoothly. Honestly hard to believe given how rough it was in the past.
That said, I don't play a wide variety of games, I tend to stick with a single game for years. So I'm happy just running "The Finals" and haven't tried other games lol.
What kind of issues are you running into with Bazzite?
For anything not gaming related, I have Linux or MacOS.
It's just a mess. There are three different ways to get software, so despite being a seasoned Linux user of 20+ years I'm never really sure if I'm installing something via the happy path or not.
I wanted to install Battle.net, for example, and the best/only way I could get it to work is by following some random forum post to run battle.net as a steam app, so if I want to play StarCraft 2 I need to launch Steam, launch bnet from within steam, then finally run sc from that.
Networking is kinda flaky, too. Sometimes games (incidentally, StarCraft, but also other battlenet games like HOTS) will simply refuse to connect to the master servers.
Controllers randomly don't work, etc.
I could go on. None of these are deal breakers in and of themselves, but I'm continually reminded why The Year of the Linux Desktop isn't happening. It's just generally janky.
I think we might both be dealing with a skewed sample set haha, given I only really played 1 game and had no issues.
it appears like you are saying "if you trust the font to be okay, you should trust anti-cheat". but we've just cleared up that they have wildly different levels of trust, due to their wildly different access, size, purpose, etc.
I know that Nvidia’s been implementing attestation for the PCI links to AI GPUs recently, and iirc USB has supported it for a while now (though I’m not sure whether USB-IF has formalized it). I would be shocked if there isn’t already a DDR standard for same coming up in 6 or 7. It’ll take a while to for all this reach the consumer market but the alternative is, as you correctly observe, the gradual decline of trustworthiness of not only attested Win11 gaming PCs but also gaming consoles — but emptying the cesspool of the software cheaters in the meantime remains a sensible step to take.
See also:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6258448 (2012)
https://memlab.ece.gatech.edu/papers/DSN_2023_2.pdf (2023)
https://pcisig.com/blog/ide-and-tdisp-overview-pcie%C2%AE-te... (2025)
https://docs.trustauthority.intel.com/main/articles/articles... (2026)
Which is why I said, even if Linux enforced TPMs, secure runtimes and signed kernels, you'd still be loading firmware blobs and trusting HID/PCI hardware just the same as Windows. Linux would still be attacked, singled-out and made a pariah regardless, so it's good that Valve and the kernel devs generally ignore these design suggestions.
it sounds like you're suggesting valve should be restricting which games they sell depending on the platform you are viewing from?
that would be annoying, and ultimately futile. i purchase games from my phone to play on my pc, or from one pc to play on another. i purchase windows-only games and mess around to see if they can work with proton. etc. i do not need valve to coddle me like that.
"system requirements" is at the bottom of every listing.
That's a totally reasonable ask.
i hate ubisoft as much as the next person, but if they listed the game as only supporting windows when it launched, and someone bought it for linux despite it not being supported, ubisoft did not make a "mistake" in selling the game to them. the buyer made a decision to purchase the game for an unsupported system.
(the rule i follow, which hasn't gone wrong yet, is to avoid all ubisoft games like the plague)
edit: am i missing something here? those disagreeing, please let me know why you believe you deserve a refund in this situation, knowing that ubisoft only advertised support for windows.
This all presumes of course that it is legitimate to ban people from using certain computing environments when running software for whatever reason you feel like. Lots of people don't think this is legitimate at all, which makes sense, because people don't really try to justify it. It's legitimate to want to ban cheaters, this is just not a reasonable means of enforcing that, because there are legitimate players who want to play the game and can't because of this policy.
you paid for a windows product. the product still works on windows, right?
if ubisoft advertised linux support for this game, i am 100% with you on the refund. as far as i can tell, they did not. they advertised the game as a windows product.
If I buy a shirt, all stores that I go to allow me to return the shirt, or exchange it for store credit.
If I go to a grocery store and get the wrong bag of granola, I able to return or exchange it.
The question is why Ubisoft deserves special treatment and gets to keep your money if you return it.
do you not believe in any sort of personal responsibility? on the same page as the "buy" button, it tells you that the game only supports windows.
>If I buy a shirt, all stores that I go to allow me to return the shirt, or exchange it for store credit.
if you wear it for 9 years, then try to return it, they will say no.
You're probably downvoted by people's emotions and feelings because they don't want to see any (even and especially if valid) defense of Ubisoft here. It's wrong and shouldn't happen, but it very much does.
I'm linux-only for 15+ years now and only buy games that run on Linux. I am filled with righteous rage when companies do what they are doing. But you're not wrong, this one is on the buyer not the seller, though everyone should remember this move and avoid buying Ubisoft games in the future because they have proven outwardly hostile.
A criticism I do give them (the seller) though, if you're going to block linux then it should be well-stated in the game description so people don't miss it. Not doing this is dishonest marketing IMHO.
If your point is simply that the publishers think this is a good business decision for them, that's obvious, because they're a business and they aren't going to make decisions they think are bad. But I am not sure how your muddled logic about feasibility feeds into that point.
This is absolutely not my claim and it's a pretty absurd interpretation of what I wrote.
My claim is that there's ample evidence that anti-cheat on Linux happens to be a pretty hard technical blocker and multiple companies at this point have chosen to ban the platform outright and take a revenue loss over trying to overcome this blocker. This directly contradicts your claim of "obviously few or no hard technical blockers" existing.
This does not imply it's impossible to implement. It implies that at this point implementing it would not justify the cost. This pretty much 100% matches the any reasonable interpretation of the term "technical blocker"
> There are obviously few or no hard technical blockers preventing Valve and the Linux community from supporting any game that runs on Windows
'Few' there is doing a fair amount of work: it allows that some significant (or "hard" if you prefer) blockers may still exist (this is consistent with my own observations of game compatibility in aggregate). So your (implicit) insistence that I claimed there are no blockers is obviously nonsensical already. But, furthermore, I went on to say this:
> unless it's been specifically engineered to block Linux
Which precisely describes a game that previously worked on Linux, with anticheat even, but now has been updated to remove that compatibility! It also describes a game whose anticheat has been configured that way since launch.
Also, your implication that "hard technical blocker" and "not worth it to implement" are interchangeable is ridiculous in any scope, whether you're Valve deciding whether to commit tens or hundreds of man-years to Proton development or a one man shop considering a hacky workaround in a client's dated web framework.
You are just barking at the mailman. I'm done here unless you can respond to the actual substance and nuance of my comments rather than a strawman.
Before the ban the cheater population was disproportionally high on Linux.
No, they didn't, you don't need to lie. From your url:
> EASY ANTI-CHEAT
> Updated Easy Anti-Cheat client module and library.
> Developer's Comment:* This update of Easy Anti-Cheat makes the game playable on Steam Deck.*
That is not "we made a change to specifically run on deck." Steam deck support might be accidental side effect of them getting newer anti-cheat tech.
You also don't advertise that it works on the steam deck by accident.
Still user's problem if they manage or not manage to run the game through whatever translation and emulation layers they have instead of using official system requirements.
Why would they specifically mention the Steam Deck? EAC doesn't have separate flags for Linux and Steam Deck. It's almost certain they intentionally allowed it to run on Linux. They call out Steam Deck by name because it is a popular handheld that has greatly increased the # of Linux users, not because an EAC update allowed it to work by chance.
> you lie!
It's becoming more common, and I know I'll downvote anything that says it because it isn't constructive.
Back to the point, the quote definitely says to me that they support Linux other why mention that the game is playable on Steam Deck?
Because it became playable? And now it's not. System requirements are still the same. You can see them on game purchase page.
.. that must have been some atrocious telemetry data correlating cheaters and Linux. I wish they’d released a report on it — I mean, fuck Ubisoft, but at least we’d have data to argue about rather than this copout of a release note from them.
the developer says it is windows only. a 3rd party, not the developer, says the game can work on non-windows. who should you believe? a real mystery.
maybe the kids arent alright
this is getting silly though. i am saddened that the concept of personal responsibility has been so eroded. best of luck on your refund.
I've gotten refunds for less. If an update introduces a fault, that's on the company, no matter the fault. Compatibility with my fridge might be the reason I bought that game. An update removing that functionality leaves the game with a fault, for which I can get the game refunded (or fixed, but companies tend to go with refunds).
So you expect them to deny refunds and then say "hey you shouldn't have believed us"?
you can't buy a shirt, wear it for 9 years, then return it.
Do you have a reply for this part?
it's a lie to say you received no benefit from the transaction. you either played it for more than 2 hours (benefit) or you are allowed to refund it via steam's standard policy.
do you have a reply to this comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524418
I have to unpack a few things to answer the whole comment faithfully. First is the distinction between "we forbid linux users from running the software" and "we aren't going to invest any development work on making linux APIs work". The first one is in my view completely indefensible and should be illegal. The second one is basically fine even though I personally dislike it. I am mentioning this because companies use "support" as a euphemism for both. My understanding of the situation here is that the game runs fine on linux, ubisoft just isn't able to stop cheating as effectively. Note that both platforms have a nonzero rate of cheating and of valid play.
Companies have a right and an obligation to advertise how their products are designed to work and how they work best. If a shirt has a care label that says don't bleach, and I damage it by bleaching, that's on me. Adapting this analogy to software is dangerous and wrong, because software can be made to break for arbitrary reasons, some of which are my own stupid fault and some of which are just the vendor exercising power over me. If I manage to bleach my shirt without damaging it, the manufacturer has no right to set it on fire and say "well you bleached it, so what did you expect?". If they did, they would have to compensate me. I view what has happened much more like "they set my shirt on fire" than "I broke my own shirt".
Computer programs are also not really similar to physical products at all, since physical products degrade over time and programs do not. If I use a shirt for five years and then abruptly decide I didn't want it after all, then I've still damaged the thing and should not get the full amount of money back for it. The fact it's second hand also makes it harder to sell even if it isn't damaged. But again this is just fake when applied to software, so that tips the balance more towards refunding than normally. The situation as it currently is, means that while Ubisoft is allowed to take away my product by saying "you should never have been able to buy it", I cannot reciprocally take my money back by saying "I should never have been able to buy it". I don't think there is a good justification for that asymmetry.
the game specifically said it only supported windows. that means it explicitly does not support other platforms. they waived their responsibility to cater to your unsupported use case. people who purchased it understood that when they bought it. caveat emptor.
if we carry this on much longer my comments are just going to be flagged, so, good luck with your refund.
I don't see why this matters.
> they waived their responsibility to cater to your unsupported use case.
I don't see why they should have the right to do that. They could just give me access to the unmodified product they originally sold me, rather than the one they didn't actually sell me, and we'd have no issue. They did support my use case. The fact that they aren't now is their fault, and should thus be their problem to solve.
> people who purchased it understood that when they bought it. caveat emptor.
The Romans weren't familiar with products being able to change from under you. It's one thing to buy a product not knowing what it does support. It's another to buy it, knowing it does work for you, only for it to change due to the whims of the seller. Not to mention we can do better. Consumer protection is important. I don't want an economy based on caveat emptor being an unbreakable truth.
> good luck with your refund.
I've already had success. I live in a country with good consumer protection laws. I wish the rest of the world would catch up.
What country allows people to return products made years ago simply because they no longer want them? I might have an idea there. My EU country allows only 14 days to return things for no reason.
And also yes, it matters what product promises. Otherwise I can buy the game when some cheat works and when cheat stops working (due to anticheat improvement) demand refund, because it worked one way before, and now it doesn't. Broken product, cheating must be protected by laws.
None that I know of. This is a mischaracterisation of what I wrote.
> And also yes, it matters what product promises. Otherwise I can buy the game when some cheat works and when cheat stops working (due to anticheat improvement) demand refund, because it worked one way before, and now it doesn't. Broken product, cheating must be protected by laws.
If the game doesn't provide a way to roll back to a previous patch, nor allows you to use said cheat (or whatever other additional software for that matter) while running on your own server, then yes, you should be able to get a refund. The product changed from under you, and might now have a fault which prevents you from using it as you (the customer) intended.
If you can roll back and set up your own server, then you still have the complete product you actually bought, with no faults. If the company changes the product from under you, they should be on the hook if that introduces any faults for any users out there.
Gameplay on the company servers is subject to the EULA, most of which ban cheating, which is one of the few reasonable rules they tend to add to those things. In that case, that use case is specifically disallowed, so there's no argument to be made that the game has a fault if a cheat gets patched into extinction. You should however still be able to play using the old patch on your own server. The fact that you can play on your own server and cheat doesn't automatically mean you can do the same on random servers.