Irdeto, the company behind Denuvo and the newer Denuvo Anti-Cheat have announced that developers on Steam can now get direct anti-cheat integration through Steamworks. Denuvo is one of the most popular DRM solutions, with it often appearing in Windows releases of popular AAA games. Now with this Anti-Cheat easily available direct through Steam no doubt many developers will look to use it.
The question is: how will this affect Linux compatibility of games both native Linux builds and Windows games run through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer? Back in May, we reported that the Denuvo team did mention they were aiming for support of Proton.
After shooting a message over to Irdeto here's what Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto, said in reply:
We can confirm that future deployments of Denuvo Anti-Cheat will not prohibit Linux users from accessing single-player and non-competitive multiplayer features of their games. For example, campaigns or custom multiplayer game matches. Linux users will not be required to install a kernel-mode driver, and the lack of anti-cheat software will not prevent their game from starting.
Even though there is no kernel-mode driver on Linux, the userspace game process performs significant cheat detection. Linux users accessing multiplayer will be reported to online services as running at lower integrity. Some game developers may choose to prevent Linux users from accessing ranked or competitive game modes. We'll do our best to convince developers and publishers to allow Linux users to participate in competitive modes. Still, we must be honest with them and disclose our reduced detection capability on Linux.
We'll communicate concrete plans for growing Linux detection capability and how the community can contribute as our userbase grows.
In a further clarification to us, we asked if this was only for Windows games in the Proton compatibility layer or if it will have the same kind of support for native Linux builds to which they replied "This is for Windows games in Proton".
When asked for their plans (if any) to support native Linux builds of games, here's what they said:
We have not yet been engaged by an organization expressing interest in native anti-cheat support for Linux. Once there is demand, we’d have no hesitation to take on that task. It’s worth noting that we’ve had anti-cheat technology on consoles for many years now. Our experience with Linux-like environments on the Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation 4 & 5 indicates that effective native Linux anti-cheat would require a from-the-ground-up effort and not just a port. Denuvo Anti-Cheat is heavily dependent on hardware security features which makes it fairly kernel-agnostic, so it’s just a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. Our best bang-for-the-buck in the short term is Proton.
So there you have it. If demand comes, they will do it too and it's only a matter of time. Nice to see them being so open about it and happy to chat with us on it so clearly.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: Shmerlvalve did an talk about this topic, you should take a look at it.Quoting: elmapulby perfect i mean "good enough", hackers will always find an way to break the anti cheat protection, its runing on your machine after all so you are in control.
I meant good enough to make the game enjoyable. If someone "breaks" it in a way that doesn't ruin the game, why should anyone care? AI on the server side can be gradually improved to catch robotic or unnatural behavior of cheaters. That's more than enough for it. But AI needs investment and a lot of work to get right. Making a rootkit on the client side is an easier no brainer and unscrupulous companies obviously choose that. I don't see any excuse for that besides basic greed.
Quoting: Shmerllike it or not, this strategy fucking works.Quoting: elmapulaccording to then, they would stop it, if valve reduces their cut to 12%, wich didnt happened
Well, I don't buy the argument of using anti-competitive methods by those who claim they are advancing competition. It's bunk.
and we have exclusives at linux too, the difference is, we make exclusives by the lack of standards.
often you see an program that only works on ubuntu or only works on redhat because its hard to suport all those distros.
so what the distro mantainers do? they join in an effort like w3c and khronos group to create an standard that will allow you to write an program only once and run on all the distros?
pff, nope, they fragment it even more, no incentive to cooperate.
hell, the fact that we have snaps, flatpaks and appimages kinda of proves that.
and the fact that some distros like mint found excuses to not support snaps and went out of their way to make sure you cant install snaps on mint, proves it again.
sure they said it was proprietary or something like that, but guess what? steam is too, and they support it.
the distro mantainers fight each other in what package manager they use, meanwhile more and more developers start to ignoring then and distribute their softwares and games on steam instead.
Quoting: elmapulvalve did an talk about this topic, you should take a look at it.
Well, I will when they'll develop a server side AI like I described above. Until then, I have no interest in client side rootkits whatsoever. I don't buy the argument that it's the right way to address this problem.
Last edited by Shmerl on 20 January 2021 at 3:08 am UTC
ShinyaOsen Jan 20, 2021
Quoting: ShmerlI thought DRM-free music situation isn't bad. There are a number of good stores where you can get even DRM-free FLAC:
Havent heard of these places before and didnt know tidal sold music every time i went or was sent to their site i only ever saw their streaming service. Guess it doesnt help that i dont buy a lot of western music and my friends never buy music they only stream it.
Quoting: ShinyaOsenHavent heard of these places before and didnt know tidal sold music every time i went or was sent to their site i only ever saw their streaming service.
Yeah, on Tidal it's a bit obscure, but you can actually buy DRM-free FLAC there.
noderunner Jan 20, 2021
Quoting: Shmerli didnt said that was their solution, i cant remember wich one was, in any case, you should at least take a look at it to see if there is any techinical issue that you didnt tought about before or to call it bullshit knowing what you're talking aboutQuoting: elmapulvalve did an talk about this topic, you should take a look at it.
Well, I will when they'll develop a server side AI like I described above. Until then, I have no interest in client side rootkits whatsoever. I don't buy the argument that it's the right way to address this problem.
Quoting: noderunnerGame developers are notoriously awful at anti-cheat. The solution should be to architect the game server to perform anti-cheating checks and generally to avoid trusting the client (see VACNET). Instead we have the lazy way, which is installing invasive software to prevent the game client from being tampered with. I don't want native Linux anti-cheat, I especially don't want an invasive Denuvo kernel module. Just let us play single player and local multiplayer in peace.
i dont see why denuvo being avaliable for linux/working on linux would magically make every company adopt it as anti cheat for their offline games
GustyGhost Jan 20, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsIt's sad how anti cheat solutions are more effective to block legit Linux players instead of actual cheaters. And for anti-piracy protection, I haven't see any successfully case with Denuvo since the Chinese had their first success of crack them.
This last year has me of the mind that Beijing Sandingmeng may have been supported by particular interests seeking to better understand systems of digital control.
Quoting: elmapuland not all games can run server side only, what about those button mash mini games where the player who presses the button faster wins? its impossible to secure the input against hacking.
Alright, my snarky replies aside, the differences in perspective here are just from assigning completely different value to certain things things.
Last edited by GustyGhost on 20 January 2021 at 3:29 am UTC
there is a ton of really cool cooperation efforts going around *between* DEs, distros, etc
they don't always agree and sometimes this leads to parallel efforts, but this isn't a blodshed cutthroat market competition like with competing closed-source software or the way Steve Balmer made MS treat Linux
sure, foss software devs are human, and can have real emotional fallouts depending on the disagreement they have with each other, but it's usually very much a debate and not a war
and source code can be repurposed, etc... Linux Mint's X-Apps is actually a nice example of cross-distro and cross-DE effort, because thoae apps are good for Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE, ... and they are made with the explicit premise to not run only on Mint, but as many DEs as could fit the app's lean requirements
the fallout between LM and Ubuntu's Snaps is very well documwnted by Mint devs, and they don't actually impede Snaps, just ship it behind a simple lock because Ubuntu started turning "apt install xxxxx" into a way to automatically install snaps and the snap version of the app, instead of a normal repo app (eg Chromium)... locking snaps was the only way they could prevent this which for them is a shady harmful practice by Canonical... but the choice to (re)enable snaps is well documented, along with the entire reasoning
that is a strong disagreement, but a well-managed one at that
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