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Easy Anti-Cheat gets much simpler for Proton and Steam Deck

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Valve has announced that developers who use Easy Anti-Cheat for their games now have a much easier setup for Proton and the upcoming Steam Deck.

As we wrote about recently, it turned out that the announcement from Epic Games on supporting Easy Anti-Cheat for Proton was not as easy as expected. It required an SDK update for Epic Online Services, something developers noted was not exactly simple.

Thankfully, Valve has been doing more with Epic behind the scenes and the process is now much better, which should hopefully mean more developers will be able to do it. Valve has now expanded the developer documentation noting how Easy Anti-Cheat can be hooked up with Proton:

  • Proton supports Easy Anti-Cheat without requiring any recompilation, but it does require you to manually enable support for your build by following these steps in order:
    1. Go into the EAC settings on the EAC partner site and enable Linux support from the dashboard.
    2. Once that's done, download the EAC Linux library (easyanticheat_x64.so) for the SDK version integrated with your game, and add it to your depot next to the Windows library (EasyAntiCheat_x64.dll).
    3. Lastly, on the Steamworks site, publish a new build of your game containing the new depot contents. (You don't have to make any changes to the game executable, just include the new files in the depot contents.)

Valve states that starting Monday - January 24, they will begin sending out Deck Verified data to developers that use anti-cheat to notify them of the results. Once they get it, developers will have a week to accept it (broken or otherwise) or do the necessary work to get it sorted.

So, if all goes well, we might in the next few weeks see more anti-cheat enabled titles working on Linux with Proton. This would be great for the Steam Deck, since it ships with SteamOS 3 Linux.

Just some of the titles that could benefit include:

  • Apex Legends
  • Back 4 Blood
  • Dead By Daylight
  • Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
  • Halo: The Master Chief Collection
  • New World
  • Paladins
  • Rust
  • Warhammer: Vermintide 2
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43 comments
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t3g Jan 22, 2022
PUBG needs to add support as the playerbase is HUGE: https://steamcharts.com/app/578080
BielFPs Jan 22, 2022
QuotePaladins
Rust
Warhammer: Vermintide 2
From this list, those are only ones I'm thinking are willing to try to port it, the I think either will wait for people to demand (based on the success of other developers) or aren't going to do anyway.

Specially Dead by Daylight, because that would involve Behavior doing something actually good to it's players for a change


Last edited by BielFPs on 22 January 2022 at 3:28 pm UTC
akselmo Jan 22, 2022
Exciting! I hope Paladins, Halo MCC and Apex Legends will follow, I miss playing those games.


Last edited by akselmo on 22 January 2022 at 3:42 pm UTC
denyasis Jan 22, 2022
Good job by Epic and Valve. I'm sure back porting everything wasn't super trivial.

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: elgatilMmm, I was wondering.. Step 2 is just placing a certain file in a certain dir so, couldn't proton take care of that?

EAC being proprietary, I don't think Valve or anyone could distribute it without a license, even a free (as in beer) one...

Also, there are multiple versions, as mentioned in the instructions. A script in Proton works have to detect and download the correct version, and every future version.

I can see that as a potential support nightmare, since a customer would only see a broken game, and likely blame the developer, which would have been taken out of the process, and has no way of fixing it.
minkiu Jan 22, 2022
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Quoting: Arten
Quoting: elgatilMmm, I was wondering.. Step 2 is just placing a certain file in a certain dir so, couldn't proton take care of that? (And actually you could control which dir is it by changing the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH) It would remove step 2 and 3 which are the most annoying I think.

Version of anticheat with game is compiled probably need match version of library. Don't know if there is way how proton can get version... and if some game stop updating anticheat, you need multiple libraries...

I have zero idea of the underlying infra of anti cheats, but I'd assume that while adding the "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" trick would indeed work, unless it's enabled on the back end (i.e: allow linux library to queries to even be considered) it would still return as "false"


Last edited by minkiu on 22 January 2022 at 5:34 pm UTC
fenglengshun Jan 22, 2022
If even just Apex gets it, then I'm going to be so very happy. That's literally the only game that I want to play as of late that has anti-cheat.
Spyker Jan 22, 2022
QuoteThere are Linux binaries missing on GOG although a port is available on Steam. These developers don't have to do much but upload the existing build, besides their Windows and potential macOS releases, but simply refuse to avoid the work afterwards!

So I have my doubts that many games will be made compatible for a system of which many developers are unsure. They'll rather wait to see how many people will install Windows on the Steam Deck before committing to anything.

I think the situation here with Valve is different than the situation with GOG.
Because the support charge comes essentially to Valve instead of the developer.
If a developer enables EAC on Proton, the validation/testing is essentially made by Valve.
So yes they will have to support Proton, but it won't cost them as much as if they had to support native Linux.


Last edited by Spyker on 22 January 2022 at 8:01 pm UTC
scaine Jan 23, 2022
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I wonder whether there's an implied threat here. Do as we ask and get Steamdeck Verified.... or the algorithm might have something to say about surfacing your game on the Store.
forumcommunist Jan 23, 2022
I am hoping this will make battle-eye try and do the same thing
furaxhornyx Jan 23, 2022
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Quoting: kon14
Quoting: poiuzThere is a simple reason, not to ship it: If they ship it, they have to support it! That will always cost resources (i.e. money).

Except they don't need to officially support Linux through Proton either. They can just enable it for anyone wishing to play the game while clearly stating they do not offer any support or guarantees about the compatibility continuing to work in the future.

Sure, sounds a bit hypocritical, because it is, but if this was opt-out instead of opt-in nobody would ever call them out for their game breaking at some point.

Lets be real, EAC and BattleEye won't just drop support for Proton now that it's officially included, not unless there's a huge reason to do so, nor would it just stop working for anyone using the official Proton builds from Steam.

The only real world issue with any of this is how userspace detection of cheats on the client side is never going to catch up with kernelspace detection, therefore devs might be reluctant to potentially downgrade the experience for the majority of their userbase over us.
With that being said, I'm not even sure if EAC or BattleEye is actually kernelspace on Windows at this point.

Quoting: Mal
Quoting: poiuzThere is a simple reason, not to ship it: If they ship it, they have to support it! That will always cost resources (i.e. money).


False. Even today you can (try to) run any windows game on wine or proton, and if works fine, if it doesn't work the developers don't owe you support. You can open tickets ofc. But they can copy paste "not supported" and close them faster than you open them.

As a customer I would expect that "proton supported" games, with the badge clearly visible on the steam page, will offer support. But that's on voluntary basis.

Unfortunately, it may be a bit more complicated than that.
Sure, they may choose to enable compatibility and not support Linux users.

However, they still need to support their current users against cheaters, be they using Windows, Linux, or whatever. Which means testing, to be sure that some nasty people don't find a way to cheat through this compatibility, and ruin the game for your player base, which would be terrible.
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