Valve promised it would work with anti-cheat software makers EAC and BattlEye to ensure some of the most popular games will run on its upcoming Steam Deck Linux-based gaming handheld, and one of those companies is now officially on board — Epic Games announced today that its Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) now supports Linux and Mac. Not only that, it’s specifically set up to work with the Proton and Wine compatibility layers that Valve’s relying on to bring Windows games to the Deck.
BattlEye is coming to Linux, too.
I don’t know whether I should be happy or concerned about this.
More DRM and low level third party controls coming to Linux. That means we can have access to more proprietary software. We had a similar thing when HDMI / HDCP was supported and Netflix became available, but it also means we are opening up more of the control to essentially black box third party blobs.
There’s no reason for you to fear. The problem of Linux purists is they want only FREE SOFTWARE which is not possible in Linux. Any applications proprietary or FOSS must have the freedom to run wherever and whatever platform they wished as long as they are not harmful. For games, they are for consumption. They do not interfere with Linux kernel under the hood, so they avoid GPL-like viral licenses. This can be a good thing because more platforms on Linux more users. More business. More jobs. More food on the table to eat.
AER,
Yea, but DRM is notorious for being increasingly invasive to the point where you can be forced to grant publisher spyware that monitors you in order to get access to your legitimate software and content. It’s a legitimate concern IMHO. Software publishers should be sandboxed, not owners! Members of the FOSS community should be rigorously enforcing this expectation. We need to tread very carefully about accepting technology that enables outside parties to monitor and control what we run on our computers. Everyone claims they have good intentions, but for some any means are justified and I remember not too long ago microsoft even signed root kits used by game publishers. Things like this could be coming to linux as well if we’re not careful with what we allow publishers to get away with.
Yes,
I still remember the Sony DRM fiasco, and giving unknown third parties unfettered access is a bit concerning (even on Windows).
As you mentioned sandboxing was a solution, and some gamers actually ran their systems in a Linux based virtualization host. (With the usual false-positive caveats from anti-cheat systems of course).
And re: “Linux purists”, please don’t stereotype people. You would find most Linux users be perfectly fine with closed binaries, as long as they run in proper security conditions.
TPM 2.0 for Windows 11 ?
Kochise,
I haven’t seen their game plan and can only speculate about it. But users who explicitly want TMP have already been able to do so for years. It’s hard to see why MS would forcefully impose it unless they had an agenda; DRM and enforced restrictions are the most obvious use cases..
And yet they, just like all the other people who have done articles on this, fail to see the issue with this: It’s opt-in.
This means that for most games, nothing will change, at all, because there is no realistic benefit to the developers to opt-in.
ahferroin7,
It’s unclear who the “they” is you are referring to?
It sounds like you are talking about “opting in” being a developer’s decision, which I agree with. But the problem with these sorts of things is that they’re invariably forced on users who don’t have a right to “opt-in” or “opt-out”. They will be forced to install the DRM if they want the game. I tried in vein to find documentation about how these are implemented, but it would be really bad if users are forced to grant the DRM root access. That would be a bad precedent with consequences for owner rights & security.