Assuming that there really is significant cheating on Linux clients, this can just be the company saying that there are not enough users to make development of more robust anti-cheat cost effective.
This is basically the same argument that software and hardware vendors have used for decades for why they won’t support Linux
Even though EAC and BattlEye have both supported linux for 3 years now, and the devs don’t actually have to do anything as Proton functionally ports the game from Windows to Linux automatically at no cost to them.
… They’re lying.
Maybe for a smaller game studio, I could actually believe they don’t know these things.
But massive AAA studios that have direct business ties to MSFT?
They’re lying.
They’re saying anything they can to slow down linux adoption, because MSFT wants to dominate as a PC gaming OS.
They used to just ignore, play dumb, feign ignorance or perhaps just actually be incompetent… now they’re just lying to our faces.
Sure Apex. Show us your stats for how many cheaters you caught who were running on Windows vs running on Linux, and show us how at least a smidgen of methodology you used to determine the bare metal OS of someone running on a VM.
They may well be lying about their reasons/justifications, I don’t have any way to know one way or the other.
This just isn’t a new thing. Companies fave been blaming the high cost of supporting the relatively small number of users on an “alternative” OS for a very long time. Unfortunately, I think that as long as desktop Linux is in the single or low double digits of percentage of users, this is something we’re going to keep hearing.
A company is unlikely to do a thing if it’s cheaper to not do the thing.
My favourite from the old days was “we stopped/don’t support/only support Ubuntu Linux because customer support is too tough across different systems”.
Yeah. I’m not sure that this has changed much.
I suspect that was a large part of what drove the excitement for something like Valve’s Proton. It was supposed to make it easier for studios to make games available across platforms, because they would. “just work” without having to put special effort in.
This sounds like the same sort of “We found out that the cost is not actually 0, and we want out. We can’t say that though, so it’s your fault”