THE FINALS to get new kernel-based anti-cheat, devs say it will still work on Linux, SteamOS, Steam Deck

Update - 03/07/25 13:58 UTC - According to their community manager they will still maintain Linux platform support. As they said in their Discord server:

Even better, a developer of Embark followed up to note:

That's really nice to see, and far more than a lot of developers do. So we can expect to see THE FINALS continue working on Linux with Proton.

The article title was updated to reflect the updates.

Original article below:

Embark Studios announced they're working on a new anti-cheat system for THE FINALS, which sounds like bad news for players across Linux, SteamOS and Steam Deck.

Here we go again huh? We've had Apex Legends blocked, GTA Online blocked, all modern EA online games blocked, Roblox blocked, CRSED: Cuisine Royale blocked and various others. This is why we have a dedicated anti-cheat page so you can see at a glance what will work.

Buried at the bottom of the latest update notes posted today, the developer said this:

Security
With every big update comes a renewed commitment from our Anti-Cheat team:

Cheat makers operate in a low-risk, high-reward world. They profit by selling cheats, oftentimes packing them with malware that harms their own customers, and they face very little consequences for their actions. Meanwhile, players who use their cheats risk losing everything: their accounts, their money, their time, and their chance to participate in events and competitions.

Our strategy for combating this is simple: raise the cost, difficulty, and time required to develop and distribute cheats.

As mentioned in the 7.0 patch notes, a lot of cheats these days use a kernel-driver to read and write memory to gain an unfair advantage. This means that they run in a privileged mode in the Windows operating system, making it unlikely and in some cases impossible to detect via Anti-Cheat in the game client. The technical solution to combat this is kernel-driver Anti-Cheat. We believe that this is, and will be, a requirement for every competitive multiplayer game for the foreseeable future.

We’re also using machine learning to analyze player behavior, and we have been doing so since the launch of THE FINALS. Machine learning provides valuable insights, especially when detecting cheats such as aimbot usage.

In the coming months, we will also begin an incremental rollout of a new kernel-based anti-cheat solution, intended to significantly raise the bar for cheat makers.

Cheat makers exploit everyone: players, developers, and the community itself. We’re committed to protecting fair play and adapting to new threats.

Despite claims from cheat developers that they’re “undetectable,” every cheat leaves breadcrumbs and we’ve been following them. Closely.

Currently, the game uses Easy Anti-Cheat which is already Kernel Level on Windows, but user-space is enabled on Linux platforms so it does currently work. Once they force this new Kernel Level anti-cheat they're working on, that's likely to change and cause the game to be unplayable on Linux.