Even though Epic Games announced recently how they expanded support for Easy Anti-Cheat to have full support of native Linux, plus Wine / Proton (and so the Steam Deck), it seems it's not as easy as we hoped.
In the original announcement, Epic mentioned how it can be enabled with "a few clicks in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal" but the situation is never that simple. A developer of Warhammer: Vermintide 2 has written a post on Steam to explain, noting that there are two versions of EAC. There's the original and the newer version used via Epic Online Services. The majority of games are likely still with the old version, since the newer one needs SDK upgrades and newer integrations.
We already knew that developers needed the latest SDK from the original announcement, but this makes it simpler for us all to understand.
Here's what they said:
One part we already know not to be true, is a requirement of Epic Online Services authentication, as the developers of Brawlhalla showed in their own testing with the new integration which worked without users touching Epic's services directly. The other point remains though, as developers won't upgrade from the older implementation to the newer without a good reason, due to extra work involved when the older one is still getting the latest EAC updates as normal (as confirmed in a later post). Although, there may come a time Epic force EOS for it, but it stands to reason they haven't currently as it would have been a big upheaval for so many developers using it and likely caused plenty of developer backlash there.
Tripwire Interactive also hinted towards the exact same thing, when asked about hooking up support for
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, a developer noted back in September 2021, "The version of EAC used on RS 2 is not the version that is advertised in this, and it is not something that will work for RS 2 players.".
Hopefully the actual work involved in moving from old EAC to new isn't too much, but it's a reason why we've yet to see any really look to do it. Once the Steam Deck is out though, it should improve, if enough players ask developers to get it sorted, otherwise players may have to resort to a manual install of Windows on the Steam Deck instead of SteamOS 3 to play some of the most popular multiplayer titles.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Last edited by Lofty on 9 January 2022 at 3:46 pm UTC
Was Valve aware of that before they made the claim of "just a few clicks"?
If so then they made a really anti-consumer move. Lying and misleading us with Epic's help.
If like us Valve didn't know about that then I have one more reason to despise Epic, because IMO that looks like blatant sabotage since Epic already knew "nobody" uses that version of their Anticheat.
mr-victory Jan 9, 2022
Quoting: SakuretsuThe thing I really wanna know is:
Was Valve aware of that before they made the claim of "just a few clicks"?
Epic made the "few click away" announcement.
EAC was bought by Epic (not Valve) a few weeks before they announced EGS (and imho when they did, and Tim explained his "gaming vision", it became clear why they bought it. So the actual surprise was that they were supporting proton just because it would benefit gamers, not that they use it as a troyan horse to impose their infrastruture in the industry).
Reading it now it's clear that they didn't outright lie and that they really meant "Epic Game Services -which includes EAC" support is few clicks away. But the press (gamingonlinux on top in this case) wasn't disingenuous when it wrote that EAC was one click away either. Only actual devs trying to make this work know these kind of details, like that the same product EAC has two different libraries with different licenses and stuff attached. I mean, after the articles Epic could just release a statement and let the press disambiguate this. New games will probably use EOS libraries. But there is no way old ones will undergo all the work to integrate it when EAC library works fine for its intended purpose.
But I guess they were just happy to get free PR and then leave to the individual devs to deal with the unrealistic expectations of their fanbase. And possibly create attrition with them (ovbiously it's not just Vermintide, it's plenty of "plz do the few clicks and support proton" threads on EAC games Steam forums).
Last edited by Mal on 9 January 2022 at 7:03 pm UTC
Quoting: Guest413 games on Steam (link make use of Epic Online Services and don't require an Epic Games account.
Seems that the EOS is for several stuff, not only EAC. And it seems that that stuff is mostly working correctly with Wine. Also, there's a separated list for EAC https://steamdb.info/tech/AntiCheat/EasyAntiCheat/
So, enable the version few people use, make a glowing press release that's not technically inaccurate but irrelevant to the experience of most actual game developers, and then sit quietly waiting for Valve to realize they've been had, at which point they innocently say "Everything we said was the truth, it's not our fault if it was misinterpreted!"
I suppose more likely it was something more like some Epic exec got some developers and said "OK, Valve have been bugging us to do this thing. Just do the minimum to shut them up, OK? Money doesn't grow on trees (unless you count Fortnite)." And they said "Should we backport the fix to the old version?" "That sounds like extra effort to me."
Quoting: GuestPeople need to stop making this out to be some conspiracy by Epic, when itcannot be proven.
Quoting: MalQuoting: SakuretsuThe thing I really wanna know is:
Was Valve aware of that before they made the claim of "just a few clicks"?
EAC was bought by Epic (not Valve) a few weeks before they announced EGS (and imho when they did, and Tim explained his "gaming vision", it became clear why they bought it. So the actual surprise was that they were supporting proton just because it would benefit gamers, not that they use it as a troyan horse to impose their infrastruture in the industry).
Yeah, I know EAC belongs to Epic.
What I was implying is that Valve, the one pushing Linux Gaming since God knows when, and also the one who have approached Epic in regards to enabling EAC for Proton should have more information in regards to this matter since (I expect?) they have been in touch with Epic for at least some time to even negotiate about enabling Proton compatibility.
Even if Valve didn't make the claim themselves if they already knew about the information we have now and didn't make it clear to the public I still see it as a bad thing.
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So the "just a few clicks" statement made in the original announcement wasn't entirely accurate, and would only apply to titles using the EOS version of EAC, which simply hasn't been many games aside from either pretty new ones, and likely predominantly Epic exclusive titles.
We are still looking at what is or isn't going to be possible, but it's not as easy as it was made out to be -- far from it in fact.
There may be other solutions or workarounds, but ripping out the old EAC and rewriting everything to implement "NuEAC" and potentially asking our entire playerbase to connect through and sign through EOS for an honestly tiny market share that was (and would remain) unsupported from the get go might be a deal breaker.
Time will tell.