7 ms·

Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney: Linux has a 'terrifically hard audience to serve'

45 points by MarcellusDrum 5y ago

smoldesu 5y ago
The guy isn't wrong. On the other hand though, it raises a lot of questions about how he manages to serve the Android/mobile community that's almost equally as fractured. What mitigations does Fortnite have in place to stop me from loading a custom Android kernel and piping in my cheats that way? Hell, putting aside the idea of a native version, why can't you enable EAC through WINE? Is your product really that insecure? In any case, I don't imagine this will be a long-term issue. The Venn diagram of Linux users and Fortnite players are two distinct circles, distanced six feet apart.
- badlucklottery 5y ago
  >The Venn diagram of Linux users and Fortnite players are two distinct circles, distanced six feet apart. The Steam Deck and others like it might close this gap. I know if I was looking for a gaming PC for my pre-teen/teen, I'd be looking really hard at it. It can also run Windows though so that might be a good (if relatively pricey) workaround for that subset of users.
  - freemint 5y ago
    Windows is not pricey if you don't want to pay much for it.
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      The cost of a Windows license is probably less than most Fortnite players spend on the game in a year for purely cosmetic items...
- sylware 5y ago
  When I think epic: the unreal engine, a concurrent of the steam client (payment and internet distribution). Buildings binaries for distribution on linux OSes requires more experienced and more work than on the other OSes. Being a user of steam games, and as a developer, the following is what I think of, that to maximize compatibily and augment binaries life time: * Be pure ELF64 (exe and so), which depends only on libdl (static loading) and its 3 symbols (dlopen/dlsym/dlclose). Pure ELF64 means it must not use "main()" but the SYSV ELF ABI entry point (which is actually almost main()...) and use fine grained linking. * use pthread TLS, and not ELF TLS symbols (do not know if compilers provides "switches" to do that). * window system: wayland(static code)->x11(xcb libs) fallback. * 3D, gfx acceleration: vulkan (GL... mmmh... I would drop it) if the binaries are a game or a GUI which _really_ needs some sort of hardware acceleration (CPU with media instructions are seriously fast for 2D). * input: dynamically load libxkbcommon(wayland) libxkbcommon-x11(x11), that for the client side xkb state machine which is fed with keycode inputs. Joystick support would directly use kernel events and the evdev file protocol. * sound: dynamically load libasound (pulse and pipewire are hidden behind the alsa api, if ever present since it could be a simple dmix/dsnoop). Unfortunately, c++ being c++, gcc/clanc/etc c++ runtime must be forked to be libdl-ized (since it is not the case), and all 3rd party libs. This is significant work, but brutal and supposely ez.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Then don't write a Linux-native version. EAC explicitly supports a Wine passthrough mode that Epic wrote themselves. Of course, that would just push users to use Steam's Proton to play the game by Epic, but I don't really buy the "it's too technically hard" bit here. Valve ported all of their games to Linux even though they didn't need to. If Epic can't port a single game that makes them billions of dollars, then I have serious concerns vis-a-vis their development team.
greatgib 5y ago
Let's translate him: we can't mess with the os of Linux users like we spy and fuck up users that are using Windows. So it is a problem for us...
- duxup 5y ago
  Is there some information to indicate that is the problem?
  - haunter 5y ago
    Yes, anti-cheat >We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones. https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/149056592564871578... People hate cheaters though so that's a really hard problem to solve
    - duxup 5y ago
      I guess I don’t think of anti-cheat measures as “ mess with the os of Linux users like we spy and fuck up users that are using Windows “ Maybe those worlds do overlap but anti cheat measures do seem like something you have to do to keep the game viable / people playing.
    - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
      Dota 2 works perfectly on linux. There is no indication that popular cheating software for Dota is made for linux. On the contrary, most cheaters use windows.
      - danbolt 5y ago
        I don’t know how DOTA 2 works, but if it follows the same “command-determinism” model that typical RTS games do, then the sort of cheating found in first-person shooters might not apply. It’s a big reason why a lot of people continue to play Age of Empires II via Wine today.
    - 5y ago
antifa 5y ago
That's fine, I'll continue not purchasing games that require Windows.
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  Fortnite is F2P.
  - antifa 5y ago
    Epic games does not provide a linux installer for the epic game store.
    - hammyhavoc 5y ago
      I know, but you did say "purchase", and unfortunately for the HN community, I was in my pre-coffee pedantic state, so I do apologize. :- )
ethagknight 5y ago
FTA Angry Tweeter: “Newsflash: CEO does not trust his own product” Tim Sweeney: With regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite's size, YES THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT!
devit 5y ago
There's a very simple solution for the anti-cheat problem: make Linux users play only with each other (this also applies to other platform users who refuse to run the anti-cheat). I'm quite skeptical about their argument though, since on Windows you can also disable secure boot and then run a custom kernel or a custom hypervisor, so it's only valid if their anti-cheat rejects all Windows hypervisors and also checks the integrity of the Windows kernel (in this case it's still of course not secure, but the anti-cheat itself would need to be patched to defeat it).
- stevewodil 5y ago
  That is not a solution to anti cheat in the slightest. What if I want to play with my friends who aren’t on Linux? Oops we removed cross platform capabilities. Also making all the players who can’t run anti cheat play together means almost any individual non-cheating player will be overrun by the cheaters and essentially pushed out of the game.
  - devit 5y ago
    > What if I want to play with my friends who aren’t on Linux? Oops we removed cross platform capabilities. You can play with them just fine, but if you use match making you would only be matched with other groups where there is at least one person running Linux. > Also making all the players who can’t run anti cheat play together means almost any individual non-cheating player will be overrun by the cheaters and essentially pushed out of the game. Just because people can cheat doesn't mean they will in significant enough numbers. Also the so-called "cheating" is just a perfectly normal way to use a general-purpose computer to run code of your choosing and to automate tasks, so you can do it as well if you want, and it's perfectly normal that if you refuse to automate your performance may suffer since you are using an inferior strategy.
    - quocanh 5y ago
      It doesn't have to be significant. Just having 1 hacker in the 100 PLAYERS PER LOBBY will ruin the game - there will be no chance of a legitimate player winning, ever. Games have been abandoned even though companies actively catch cheaters because no one wants to play against someone with an unfair advantage. If Epic releases a game where they literally cannot catch cheaters, that game will be abandoned in a week. Your defense of cheating is laughable. People are trying to play a game with a closed set of rules. Saying that your hacks are legal because they're turing-complete is completely nonsensical. You are not playing the same game that people signed up for. You're hijacking someone else's enjoyment for your own power fantasies.
no_time 5y ago
I expected valve to go all in with trusted computing. One verified kernel and boot chain to rule them all. Pleasantly surprised this is not the case (as it appears now)
oneoff786 5y ago
Seems accurate? The article even highlights Sweeney praising the openness of the steam deck. I don’t see any reason to view this negatively.
binarynate 5y ago
This is an economic problem, not a technical one. From the article: > “Linux is a small market already and if you subdivide it by blessed kernel versions then it’s even smaller.” It may not be worth Epic’s while to put in the work on security for what will be a comparatively tiny audience, at least at first. For many products, there's not currently an economic incentive to support Linux because the development cost, support cost, and opportunity cost outweigh the potential revenue. I'm sympathetic to this because it's something I face with my own product. In many cases, the Linux market currently isn't large enough to justify the cost, but I hope that changes in the future.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  the economic problem is a consequence of the technological situation as its exactly the diversity of the Linux ecosystem that fragments the market. it's the same problem with a lot of support for Linux. Because you have to support so many different configurations and different systems each one turns out to be too small to actually be viable.
f1refly 5y ago
I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but: Cheating in online games is not a problem. We have essentially two cases to consider: 1. The cheater is using a rage cheat to get ahead of everything, in disregard of wether he will keep the account. This is pretty easy to detect programmatically, even more so for a human watching the demo. This case is rather rare, because accounts tend to be expensive/annoying to get into a state where competitve queuing is possible. 2. The cheater is using a tool to covertly rise the competitive ranks without showing his advantage directly. This is also not a problem because for 99,9% of players there is no difference if they're playing against a cheater who gives himself a slight advantage or simply against a better player. This player will rise through the ranks until he finds the spot where his tool assisted performance places him or he will have to increase the assistance to a point where he's getting into category 1 territory and is banned. If hidden cheating is getting important because money is in the performance when reaching the top 0.0001% of players, we're getting into lan territory where the hardware setups are either provided or checked. For fair players type one is annoying, but a rare occurance due to the deterrences measures taken for new accounts. Type two is moot. I conclude: Cheating is not an issue for normal people.
- GauntletWizard 5y ago
  There's actually a lot more room between #1 and #2 than you'd believe, and human review is expensive, especially in F2P games like Fortnite. The cost of a mistaken ban is also high. It used to be a meme that any decent CS player got banned once a day for hacking by clueless admins, and that was with review (CS had great replay tools for server admins) by players who cared enough to host their own servers. That was also in the days where if you got banned, you moved to another server, no biggie. In the F2P shooter world, there are often several hundred dollars of spend on cheaters accounts, because the people who crave instant gratification of cheating are generally also the whales. That creates a perverse incentive on both sides - Ban then and you've taken their money for "nothing", don't ban them and get more money from them.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  Both of these types of cheating can be a big problem for online game if it becomes prevalent that it starts to cause attrition among the rest of the playerbase.

45 points by MarcellusDrum 5y ago

The guy isn't wrong. On the other hand though, it raises a lot of questions about how he manages to serve the Android/mobile community that's almost equally as fractured. What mitigations does Fortnite have in place to stop me from loading a custom Android kernel and piping in my cheats that way? Hell, putting aside the idea of a native version, why can't you enable EAC through WINE? Is your product really that insecure? In any case, I don't imagine this will be a long-term issue. The Venn diagram of Linux users and Fortnite players are two distinct circles, distanced six feet apart.

badlucklottery 5y ago
>The Venn diagram of Linux users and Fortnite players are two distinct circles, distanced six feet apart. The Steam Deck and others like it might close this gap. I know if I was looking for a gaming PC for my pre-teen/teen, I'd be looking really hard at it. It can also run Windows though so that might be a good (if relatively pricey) workaround for that subset of users.
- freemint 5y ago
  Windows is not pricey if you don't want to pay much for it.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    The cost of a Windows license is probably less than most Fortnite players spend on the game in a year for purely cosmetic items...
sylware 5y ago
When I think epic: the unreal engine, a concurrent of the steam client (payment and internet distribution). Buildings binaries for distribution on linux OSes requires more experienced and more work than on the other OSes. Being a user of steam games, and as a developer, the following is what I think of, that to maximize compatibily and augment binaries life time: * Be pure ELF64 (exe and so), which depends only on libdl (static loading) and its 3 symbols (dlopen/dlsym/dlclose). Pure ELF64 means it must not use "main()" but the SYSV ELF ABI entry point (which is actually almost main()...) and use fine grained linking. * use pthread TLS, and not ELF TLS symbols (do not know if compilers provides "switches" to do that). * window system: wayland(static code)->x11(xcb libs) fallback. * 3D, gfx acceleration: vulkan (GL... mmmh... I would drop it) if the binaries are a game or a GUI which _really_ needs some sort of hardware acceleration (CPU with media instructions are seriously fast for 2D). * input: dynamically load libxkbcommon(wayland) libxkbcommon-x11(x11), that for the client side xkb state machine which is fed with keycode inputs. Joystick support would directly use kernel events and the evdev file protocol. * sound: dynamically load libasound (pulse and pipewire are hidden behind the alsa api, if ever present since it could be a simple dmix/dsnoop). Unfortunately, c++ being c++, gcc/clanc/etc c++ runtime must be forked to be libdl-ized (since it is not the case), and all 3rd party libs. This is significant work, but brutal and supposely ez.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Then don't write a Linux-native version. EAC explicitly supports a Wine passthrough mode that Epic wrote themselves. Of course, that would just push users to use Steam's Proton to play the game by Epic, but I don't really buy the "it's too technically hard" bit here. Valve ported all of their games to Linux even though they didn't need to. If Epic can't port a single game that makes them billions of dollars, then I have serious concerns vis-a-vis their development team.

greatgib 5y ago

Let's translate him: we can't mess with the os of Linux users like we spy and fuck up users that are using Windows. So it is a problem for us...

duxup 5y ago
Is there some information to indicate that is the problem?
- haunter 5y ago
  Yes, anti-cheat >We don’t have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones. https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781 https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/149056592564871578... People hate cheaters though so that's a really hard problem to solve
  - duxup 5y ago
    I guess I don’t think of anti-cheat measures as “ mess with the os of Linux users like we spy and fuck up users that are using Windows “ Maybe those worlds do overlap but anti cheat measures do seem like something you have to do to keep the game viable / people playing.
  - abdullahkhalids 5y ago
    Dota 2 works perfectly on linux. There is no indication that popular cheating software for Dota is made for linux. On the contrary, most cheaters use windows.
    - danbolt 5y ago
      I don’t know how DOTA 2 works, but if it follows the same “command-determinism” model that typical RTS games do, then the sort of cheating found in first-person shooters might not apply. It’s a big reason why a lot of people continue to play Age of Empires II via Wine today.
  - 5y ago

antifa 5y ago

That's fine, I'll continue not purchasing games that require Windows.

hammyhavoc 5y ago
Fortnite is F2P.
- antifa 5y ago
  Epic games does not provide a linux installer for the epic game store.
  - hammyhavoc 5y ago
    I know, but you did say "purchase", and unfortunately for the HN community, I was in my pre-coffee pedantic state, so I do apologize. :- )

ethagknight 5y ago

FTA Angry Tweeter: “Newsflash: CEO does not trust his own product” Tim Sweeney: With regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite's size, YES THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT!

devit 5y ago

There's a very simple solution for the anti-cheat problem: make Linux users play only with each other (this also applies to other platform users who refuse to run the anti-cheat). I'm quite skeptical about their argument though, since on Windows you can also disable secure boot and then run a custom kernel or a custom hypervisor, so it's only valid if their anti-cheat rejects all Windows hypervisors and also checks the integrity of the Windows kernel (in this case it's still of course not secure, but the anti-cheat itself would need to be patched to defeat it).

stevewodil 5y ago
That is not a solution to anti cheat in the slightest. What if I want to play with my friends who aren’t on Linux? Oops we removed cross platform capabilities. Also making all the players who can’t run anti cheat play together means almost any individual non-cheating player will be overrun by the cheaters and essentially pushed out of the game.
- devit 5y ago
  > What if I want to play with my friends who aren’t on Linux? Oops we removed cross platform capabilities. You can play with them just fine, but if you use match making you would only be matched with other groups where there is at least one person running Linux. > Also making all the players who can’t run anti cheat play together means almost any individual non-cheating player will be overrun by the cheaters and essentially pushed out of the game. Just because people can cheat doesn't mean they will in significant enough numbers. Also the so-called "cheating" is just a perfectly normal way to use a general-purpose computer to run code of your choosing and to automate tasks, so you can do it as well if you want, and it's perfectly normal that if you refuse to automate your performance may suffer since you are using an inferior strategy.
  - quocanh 5y ago
    It doesn't have to be significant. Just having 1 hacker in the 100 PLAYERS PER LOBBY will ruin the game - there will be no chance of a legitimate player winning, ever. Games have been abandoned even though companies actively catch cheaters because no one wants to play against someone with an unfair advantage. If Epic releases a game where they literally cannot catch cheaters, that game will be abandoned in a week. Your defense of cheating is laughable. People are trying to play a game with a closed set of rules. Saying that your hacks are legal because they're turing-complete is completely nonsensical. You are not playing the same game that people signed up for. You're hijacking someone else's enjoyment for your own power fantasies.

no_time 5y ago

I expected valve to go all in with trusted computing. One verified kernel and boot chain to rule them all. Pleasantly surprised this is not the case (as it appears now)

oneoff786 5y ago

Seems accurate? The article even highlights Sweeney praising the openness of the steam deck. I don’t see any reason to view this negatively.

binarynate 5y ago

This is an economic problem, not a technical one. From the article: > “Linux is a small market already and if you subdivide it by blessed kernel versions then it’s even smaller.” It may not be worth Epic’s while to put in the work on security for what will be a comparatively tiny audience, at least at first. For many products, there's not currently an economic incentive to support Linux because the development cost, support cost, and opportunity cost outweigh the potential revenue. I'm sympathetic to this because it's something I face with my own product. In many cases, the Linux market currently isn't large enough to justify the cost, but I hope that changes in the future.

Barrin92 5y ago
the economic problem is a consequence of the technological situation as its exactly the diversity of the Linux ecosystem that fragments the market. it's the same problem with a lot of support for Linux. Because you have to support so many different configurations and different systems each one turns out to be too small to actually be viable.

f1refly 5y ago

I'm not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but: Cheating in online games is not a problem. We have essentially two cases to consider: 1. The cheater is using a rage cheat to get ahead of everything, in disregard of wether he will keep the account. This is pretty easy to detect programmatically, even more so for a human watching the demo. This case is rather rare, because accounts tend to be expensive/annoying to get into a state where competitve queuing is possible. 2. The cheater is using a tool to covertly rise the competitive ranks without showing his advantage directly. This is also not a problem because for 99,9% of players there is no difference if they're playing against a cheater who gives himself a slight advantage or simply against a better player. This player will rise through the ranks until he finds the spot where his tool assisted performance places him or he will have to increase the assistance to a point where he's getting into category 1 territory and is banned. If hidden cheating is getting important because money is in the performance when reaching the top 0.0001% of players, we're getting into lan territory where the hardware setups are either provided or checked. For fair players type one is annoying, but a rare occurance due to the deterrences measures taken for new accounts. Type two is moot. I conclude: Cheating is not an issue for normal people.

GauntletWizard 5y ago
There's actually a lot more room between #1 and #2 than you'd believe, and human review is expensive, especially in F2P games like Fortnite. The cost of a mistaken ban is also high. It used to be a meme that any decent CS player got banned once a day for hacking by clueless admins, and that was with review (CS had great replay tools for server admins) by players who cared enough to host their own servers. That was also in the days where if you got banned, you moved to another server, no biggie. In the F2P shooter world, there are often several hundred dollars of spend on cheaters accounts, because the people who crave instant gratification of cheating are generally also the whales. That creates a perverse incentive on both sides - Ban then and you've taken their money for "nothing", don't ban them and get more money from them.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
Both of these types of cheating can be a big problem for online game if it becomes prevalent that it starts to cause attrition among the rest of the playerbase.