Easy Anti-Cheat not as simple as expected for Proton and Steam Deck

[Deleted member 67800]

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:

So we have looked in to this. It's far more complex than first suspected -- EAC has two versions. Non-EOS and EOS (Epic Online Services). Most games historically use Non-EOS EAC. It's the one Vermintide 2 uses as well. Epic only added Proton support for the EOS version of EAC. Therefor in order to implement proton support for Vermintide 2, a huge amount of reworking of the EAC implementation would be required, which may also require all players to authenticate with Epic Online Services as well -- perhaps even logging in to the Epic environment (to be confirmed, however).

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.

Click to shrink...

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.".

Easy Anti-Cheat not as simple as expected for Proton and Steam Deck

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.

www.gamingonlinux.com

 

[LewieP]

Feels like for example EA is not going to switch the entirety of Apex Legends over to Epic Online Services, so I'm guessing that will mean no Apex on Steam Deck/Linux.

Would be a bit more understandable if this applied to future releases, but it's a negative for all involved parties if this results in games not being available on Deck. But I suppose it's a bigger loss for Valve than it is for Epic...

 

[SteveWinwood]

Easy Anti-Cheat requires developers to use Epic Online Services to enable Proton/Linux support Rumor - PC - Valve

This could be a huge barrier in getting developers to get their games working for the Steam Deck (while running SteamOS of course). This could be why we haven’t seen as many games with EAC get support for Linux/Proton yet. I'm not getting a Deck right away and I might switch to Windows when I...

www.resetera.com

dont worry about it though, somebody says people are just being dramatic

 

[Spazerbeam]

I expect most live service games (at least the bigger ones) will try to implement it. I'm thinking specifically Destiny 2 where it's big enough that Valve might even try to work with the team but who knows. Mostly wishful thinking.

 

[TrashHeap64]

Feels like for example EA is not going to switch the entirety of Apex Legends over to Epic Online Services, so I'm guessing that will mean no Apex on Steam Deck/Linux.

Click to shrink...

Kinda ironic seeing as how Apex runs on Valve's Source Engine.

 

[Spork4000]

Yeah, any time a company says "don't worry about -insert technical challenge-" you should worry about the technical challenge

 

[Orion117]

I expect most live service games (at least the bigger ones) will try to implement it. I'm thinking specifically Destiny 2 where it's big enough that Valve might even try to work with the team but who knows. Mostly wishful thinking.

Click to shrink...

Destiny 2 is BattlEye, which apparently does not even require extra work from devs. They just need to send an email asking to enable proton support.

 

[Fiddle]

I believe there are already games that are using this "new" EAC and they don't require using an Epic account. I think it was Brawlhalla? I think the dev is misinformed here.