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Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton

• stavros 11mo ago
  Hm, most of these seem updated 3-4 years ago, is this list relevant any more?
  • Zhyl 11mo ago
    Do you have examples of where something isn't accurate? If something hasn't changed it doesn't need to be updated. As far as I'm aware the things that change are updated quickly, hence the list is relevant.
    • stavros 11mo ago
      No, I just assumed things would change a lot.
• Hikikomori 11mo ago
  While some anti cheat supports Linux they're mostly useless as you can much more easily bypass them on Linux compared to windows. I guess enabling them for competitive games is one way to increase Linux users.
• hastily3114 11mo ago
  Is there really no way to make anti-cheat on Linux that can't be bypassed? I don't know much about this, but it seems very difficult to make an anti-cheat for a platform where you can make changes in the kernel.
  • kachapopopow 11mo ago
    Linux explicitely allows you to do things that makes cheating *really* easy. There is also complete lack of secure boot and a way to validate that your kernel hasn't been compromised. I mean seriously, making a cheat for a proton supported game that no anticheat has any hopes of detecting are in 100 lines of a kmod driver and 1 console command: insmod. On windows you at least need to use scuffed tools like KDU to bypass signature verification requirements and every anticheat can detect you with a simple physical memory scan.
    • rcxdude 11mo ago
      Linux supports secure boot just fine, it's just happy (correctly, IMO) to give the keys to the user and not the developer.
      • ChocolateGod 11mo ago
        Unfortunately right now SteamOS does not support secure boot or measured boot.
      • kachapopopow 11mo ago
        yah my bad: vendor defined secure boot*
    • kalaksi 11mo ago
      > There is also complete lack of secure boot That's not true, though?
      • kachapopopow 11mo ago
        well lack of secure boot is bad wording, lack of vendor defined secure boot.
  • Zak 11mo ago
    I think the most stringent types of Windows anti-cheat rely on remote attestation of the operating system. It's theoretically possible to design a Linux-based OS that supports such a capability, but the sort of people who choose Linux are unlikely to accept a third party having the final say over their computer. I, for one am disappointed that anyone has accepted it. Once it's widespread, service providers can demand it, as we're seeing with mobile banking apps and game anticheat.
    • Cu3PO42 11mo ago
      I also strongly dislike requiring remote attestation for any kind of software I want to run. But what I also dislike is cheaters in my online games and I genuinely do not have a better suggestion on what to do. Personally, I run Windows purely for gaming and don't let it near any important data. For the latter, I boot into Linux with separately encrypted disks.
      • progbits 11mo ago
        I'm doing the same but I worry about windows compromise messing with the bootloader so then encrypted linux drive won't save me. Probably too paranoid though?
        • Cu3PO42 11mo ago
          If you use secure boot and don't let your keys near Windows, you should be fine even if your Windows install is compromised. Unless you don't trust Microsoft themselves, in which case you'd need to re-enroll keys whenever switching operating systems, which is possible, but very tedious.
      • amiga386 11mo ago
        >But what I also dislike is cheaters in my online games and I genuinely do not have a better suggestion on what to do. You can't suggest "run online games as close-knit social groups, with social exclusion punishments for cheaters", which is how most online games used to be run. How old are you? Game vendors used to be happy letting us host and run our own multiplayer games, until they realised they could get more money out of us -- "battle passes", microtransactions, ability to forcibly turn off multiplayer of older game when newer remake comes out -- and now they've made themselves a mandatory part of your online experience. You have to use their matchmaking and their servers. So now it's down to them to solve the problem of cheaters, enabled by their centralised matchmaking... and their only solution is remote attestation of your machine and yet more data collection?
  • jsheard 11mo ago
    A trusted entity (probably Valve) could provide a locked down distro where kernel integrity is enforced through secure boot and TPM attestation, but that would mean giving up some control over your own system. There's no guarantee that anything client-side is impossible to bypass of course, but the goal would be to more or less match what Windows offers, which isn't perfect either.
    • ChocolateGod 11mo ago
      > giving up some control over your own system There could simply be a developer option that disables these integrity checks but subsequently breaks online games that rely on them. Valve could also offer a module that allows signed user-space binaries access to kernel space, which would be an improvement over Windows offers in that anti-cheat wouldn't need to live in the kernel. I think that's a fine trade off.
      • NekkoDroid 11mo ago
        You don't even need a developer mode. I was looking into making my own image based distro/system which has its bootchain entirely verified and I intend to make any modifications via system extentions[1], which IIRC also get measured aswell (or was at least planned somewhere). To be fair, this is purely additive or overlaying, so no removing of files, at best changing. This all would be signed using Secure boot and after the fact using dm-verity. Secure Boot in theory isn't even necessary, only TPM2. Secure boot only ensure that you are actually booting into a binary that you expect to boot in this case, so if your binary is actually different it would result in different PCR values in the TPM indicating something is wrong. Sadly a lot of end user software (flatpak, ...) isn't packaged & signed in a way which would allow for full "only run software I allow by importing public keys" (read Linux IPE[2]), but what can you do, only your best I suppose... [1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sysext.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-sys... [2]: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/LSM/ipe.html https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/LSM/ipe.html
    • Hikikomori 11mo ago
      Could reboot into secure mode for these types of games.
  • soloridindan 11mo ago
    I think the moment you accept data from the client as truth you've lost the battle already, everything else is just damage control. Loads of games have realized this and kept checking game rules on the serverside and reveal data on a need-to-know basis. This makes it nearly impossible for cheats to be made because anything you know you should know, and everythin you act is parsed by the backend according to rules already present
    • jsheard 11mo ago
      Some kinds of cheating can be mitigated that way, but it can't really stop cheats which just play the game more optimally than the user is able to, using the same inputs and outputs that a legit player would use. Aim assistance in shooters, automatic parries in fighting games, economy-breaking levels of automation in MMOs, and so on. There's also practical limits to how much data you can filter out in complex 3D games, both due to performance constraints, and because culling information too perfectly can cause things to pop into existence too late under real-world network latency. The effectiveness of ESP cheats can be reduced, but not eliminated in practice.
      • soloridindan 11mo ago
        I think anything that relies on reflex alone is flawed design. You can design around this, by for example in Dota2 it doesen't matter how fast you click an entity, because the turnrate of your character is limited, so a person clicking reasonably fast and a bot clicking in 0.01ms both arrive there at the same time. Precision also doesn't matter, because a player can click the icon of the enemy instead of trying to match the pixels on screen. MMO scripts that use information already given by the game just seem like the MMO should invest in UX instead of trying to ban people for using the tools the game already gives them.
        • vkou 11mo ago
          Unless DOTA2 is running at a ~3 tick rate (Which it's not), even taking account processing delays and action batching, a bot will always have faster reaction times than an actual player. It will also never misclick. This problem is magnified in a shooter game, which would be unplayable with that kind of batching, but where a cheater with an aimbot is actually impossible for a legitimate player to beat.
  • 63stack 11mo ago
    There is no way to make anticheat that can't be bypassed, regardless of OS. All of the anticheat games today have cheaters.
    • mrob 11mo ago
      Correct. E.g. you can aimbot by routing the video signal to a capture card on a separate computer and run image recognition software to generate mouse movements spoofed at the hardware level. The only way to reliably prevent cheating is with in-person tournaments played on hardware provided by the organizers.
      • tgv 11mo ago
        As someone said about the lack of a Switch anti-cheat: it's a numbers game. If cheating is as easy as downloading a .exe for a few $$$, you're going to find cheaters everywhere. If it requires a complex, and/or fairly expensive setup, the number is going to be very low. That's assuming there's no money in being a cheater.
    • calgoo 11mo ago
      The best way is to just make private servers, so people can play with their friends and not have to worry about random players. This also solves the issue of people using.... language thats not acceptable in games.
    • 360MustangScope 11mo ago
      It doesn’t have to be 100%. The point is to make it inconvenient. The majority of people will not do it if it is inconvenient. Thats the point to many things in life that you just make it more difficult and most people won’t be bothered to attempt to circumvent whatever it is. There will still be circumventers but it is will be less than if you just said fuck it.
      • zeta0134 11mo ago
        Sure. That also means it doesn't have to be kernel-level rootkits that fundamentally break the security model of my operating system and risk my bank account. Most people will be stopped by userland anticheat, right? It's inconvenient. So ... put it *there.* And if someone does the kernel bypass thing, well, rely on server-side heuristics (which are imperfect, but also unknowable to the attacker) and you'll discourage enough of that with account bans. Helpfully eSports players tend to have video captures of their gameplay, and most of these "undetectable" cheats are real obvious if you actually watch the footage. That catches most of the serious stuff at the upper level. It's why video verification has been a thing in the speedrunning scene for such a long time.
  • RobotToaster 11mo ago
    Linux is resistant to rootkits, which is what these things are, and allows you to remove them, yes. The correct solution is to verify everything server side, or actually have humans watch replays and ban cheaters, but both of those would reduce profits, so will obviously never happen.
    • lan321 11mo ago
      IMO the real solution is back in community servers and votekicking.. It works on old games with no anticheat measures.. Maybe add some blatant detection for people teleporting and doing other absolutely impossible things serverside, but I don't understand why my team has to ruin their 'reputation' teamkilling a cheater so he doesn't ruin the game completely in most current games when the anticheat only catches free, old cheats. Just let people votekick and find someone else in the matchmaking queue who's willing to join halfway through.. Once votekicked enough times you can escalate to the AI (always indians) for automated (manual) review. Also, you don't even have to ban cheaters. Just isolate them to play with each other. Some might find it fun and keep away from the normal players. Edit: The 'issue' with community server manual review and votekick is you can be kicked for being cracked or garbage at the game legitimately, but TBH at this point you're ruining the fun of everyone else, so you should probably get in another server/match.. Also that premades can have majority, but that's easily solved by reducing their vote weight.
      • Hikikomori 11mo ago
        I mean not really, as someone that had been votekicked from many games. Servers with admins does solve this, but has it's drawbacks. But you also cannot have the matchmaking type of game that are popular today. Back in MW2 if you were the host you could kick players from your game using a cli tool that adjusted firewall rules.
        • lan321 11mo ago
          For lobbied ones votekick is great as long as you remove majority vote from premades. So in a 5v5, a 3 man premade isn't able to kick any of the 2 randoms alone. I remember the misuse of it but it was better than having your only option be teamkilling, which is now punished in all games via reputation systems. The only thing I don't see this as a solution for are games like Planetside, with massive lobbies. I know they used to have automated detection and manual review by admins teleporting and flying around, usually invisible to sus players. Once we found a bug and got inside the map able to shoot through the ground and in like 15 minutes an admin came, asked us how we got in there and to get out nicely, before he gets us out forcefully :D
  • theshrike79 11mo ago
    Server-authoritative games. Basically the client does stuff, gives the list of moves to the server along with a checksum/end result. Then the server runs the same commands on the same starting state and checks if it got the same result. If a==b, then everything moves on as normal. If not, the client gets a synchronisation error and has to rewind back to the last known good state. Completely unfeasible for anything real-time pretty much.
    • 0xC0ncord 11mo ago
      Having done modding for some older shooter games built on the server-authoritative model, it's still possible to create a "pingless" experience, but it requires more calculations and compromises on client/server trust to make it work. For shooters specifically, you want the client to provide instant feedback when the gun fires, and ideally when they hit an enemy. You can achieve this by telling the server "I was at position A and shot my gun at position B and hit enemy Bob." The server will validate all of this before informing the client who fired and the client for "Bob" that Bob was killed. The compromise here is that the server must trust that the client isn't sending forged data, or the server must do additional computations to validate it.
      • PetitPrince 11mo ago
        An elaborated version of this idea is called "rollback" where you let the local client predict and execute the game state at time t+1 and will "roll back" the state of the game if it received another game state than the one predicted. Extremely popular and state of the art for 2D fighting games (most of the time the prediction is correct and it greatly reduce the perceived lag) , but probably harder a bit harder to do with 3D games.
  • JustFinishedBSG 11mo ago
    There’s just no way to stop cheating client side despite what devs love to think. But server side anti cheat is much harder and requires more work; it’s much simpler to just install spyware / rootkits on the client and call it a day.
    • 360MustangScope 11mo ago
      You can’t prevent wall hacks with only server side anti cheat. The client needs that data locally before the enemy is rendered on screen. As mentioned in another comment, you can’t do this on the server without expensive checks for every single player that is always checking line of sight, because it’s not just your session running on a single server but multiple sessions. And let’s say you did this, now you have a latency problem because most modern games to make them feel fluid has client side prediction with server reconciliation. This is what makes your modern games feel more responsive, if you put a constant server check there you have lost this. No matter what people say online, it isn’t just move all of it to the server, there is data the client needs to know and can’t be spoonfed by the server.
    • data-ottawa 11mo ago
      I think it’s an organization accountability issue. Why would a company pay for anti cheat infrastructure when they can outsource it to some company and blame them if there are cheaters or upset users? Windows is the status quo too, so it’s very easy to point to everyone else when justifying your choice to the execs. It would be great if steam deck+box start costing studios quantifiable amounts of money that can be used to justify fixing this instead of outsourcing and hand waving.
  • CuriouslyC 11mo ago
    You can run a VM using trusted computing extensions for the game. If the VM encrypts traffic, that stops network level cheats. You can still fake inputs/outputs to the machine if you put the work in, but then you can also use a vision model and faked input with actual consoles, so that hole is never going to get patched.
  • mcv 11mo ago
    Reliable anticheat is serverside. Clientside anticheat sounds like a fool's errand to me. You need to control the client, so that means the user cannot be in control of their own computer, which is contrary to the idea of Linux.
    • kimos 11mo ago
      It works on Windows by essentially rooting the machine. MS holds control of a bunch of stuff because they hold the signing keys. It’s fundamentally incompatible with open source.
      • tete 11mo ago
        And it still doesn't prevent cheating.
        • SirMaster 11mo ago
          No, but it seems to vastly reduce it. Compare VAC2 to FACEIT on CS2 for example.
          • vablings 11mo ago
            Comparing VAC2 (released in 2005) to FACEIT in 2025 is pretty dumb. There are still absolutely cheaters running rampant on FACEIT and FPL. The real solution is to limit information sent to the client, make it harder for cheaters to have reliable solutions to get access to critical game information. ARC Raiders has Theia anti tamper (very poor performance) but right now the number of cheaters is minimal because the select few who are smart enough to break the anti-tamper are keeping quiet. See other examples; The Finals, Roblox (Byfron) and Overwatch https://codedefender.io/sigbreaker/ https://codedefender.io/sigbreaker/
      • embedding-shape 11mo ago
        > It’s fundamentally incompatible with open source Yeah, I mean why would they open source their anti-cheats, would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? Not sure why you bring up OSS here, it isn't relevant in the least, plenty of non-OSS runs on Linux even though Linux and more is OSS.
  • tete 11mo ago
    You are looking completely wrong at this. There is no anti-cheat that cannot be bypassed. Period. You can always run things in a VM, you can always replace your keyboard and mouse with a different device, you can always have your a camera instead of human eyes and have something that recognizes enemies. Even cheat detection in the real physical world (sports, chess, etc.) is not a completely solved topic. You can connect computers to other computers so other computers will always be able to control them. The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is unbypassable is silly.
    • embedding-shape 11mo ago
      > The idea that any (currently realistic) cheat prevention is unbypassable is silly. The idea that anti-cheats don't make sense because they don't catch 100% of the cheaters is what's silly, who believes that? Not even the people writing these anti-cheats believe catching 100% of them are possible, why are you under the assumption that others think that's possible? If it removes 80% of the cheaters from the game, the experience goes from "Holy shit lets leave" to "Ok, bothersome, but fine", this is what they're reaching for, not some fantasy utopia that you seem to be under the impression is the target.
      • saghm 11mo ago
        I don't think the comment you're responding to is trying to claim that. They're responding to the parent comment asking if there's any way to actually make a Linux anti-cheat method that isn't bypassable and pointing out that this framing isn't really useful because there's no way to make one on any platform that's actually impossible to bypass. Their point isn't about whether it's useful or not to have imperfect anti-cheat but that there's nothing fundamental about Linux that changes the fact that the anti-cheat is going to be imperfect anywhere.
      • krzyk 11mo ago
        > the experience goes from "Holy shit lets leave" to "Ok, bothersome, but fine", This is making those rootkit anitcheat mechanism work. If people will leave, cheaters will play only with cheaters - problem solved.
  • Q6T46nT668w6i3m 11mo ago
    Yeah. It’s an erosion of rights that doesn’t solve the problem. You only need one cheater to make a game feel bad and DMA devices or pixel tracking can’t be stopped with these anti-cheats.
  • theknarf 11mo ago
    I mean kernel level anti-cheat doesn't really work on Windows either, its just security theater.
    • surajrmal 11mo ago
      Based on what data do you draw that conclusion? The fact that cheaters can still exist isn't an indictment that it doesn't ever work. Have you ab tested a game with an without anti cheat?
      • theknarf 11mo ago
        I'm sure if you ab-tested a game with anti cheat vs a game with kernel-level anti cheat you would see negligible differences. There are a lot of types of anti cheat, stuffing it in the kernel isn't the only solution. You can't chose between security and freedom, the moment you make a choice you loose both, and other people stuffing stuff in the kernel is loosing you freedom. We are moments away from one of these "kernel-level anti cheat" companies getting hacked and then you'll have the biggest security scandal on the planet (if they aren't already hacked and we just don't know about it yet).
  • HALtheWise 11mo ago
    I did a pretty deep dive into this recently, although haven't yet started any implementation work. As far as I can tell, the best strategy that preserves Linux's open-source and user-empowering ideals as much as possible: - The game obviously needs to run as root, at least until large amounts of this stuff gets upstreamed into the kernel. - We're going to be leaving the kernel and boot as untrusted, but injecting a hypervisor underneath the running kernel that is responsible for protecting most pages of game memory. This allows users to still run whatever kernel they want. - The hypervisor sets up two sets of page tables, one that's only active when the game's thread is running and in userspace, one that hides protected pages and is active when the kernel or other threads are running. Note that game code itself needs to get decrypted into protected ram. - The TPM of the system gets involved when we jump into the hypervisor to attest that the hypervisor is actually running, and the hypervisor then provides attestations to userspace that certain memory regions are protected from kernel or other thread access. - Any syscalls will fail if they require the kernel to read or write pages that are protected. The game needs to allocate data that should be shared with the kernel into non-protected pages. - When the game is closed, we can remove the hypervisor and Linux will be back to bare metal operation. This should be unobservable to the rest of the system. This architecture preserves the ability of users to run arbitrary kernel modules, but does mean a hypothetical attacker can observe data that passes through the kernel (like draw calls/pixels). It's likely that a more complete implementation would also want some way for the hypervisor to attest to the accuracy of keyboard/mouse input and interface with iommu configuration like Windows KAC does.
• droolboy 11mo ago
  The only game I miss when I moved to Linux was League of Legends. Everything else pretty much works. I get that it’s not worth it for them to deal with more potential cheating, but it’s a bummer.
  • Kenji 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • _cenw 11mo ago
    The worst thing about League was that Riot added it retroactively after years of effort to patch Wine to work with League's weird quirky code. It was the only game that I always remember having a custom Wine build in Lutris even as far back as the early 2010s. It also would be completely unnecessary if they fixed their servers.
  • asdff 11mo ago
    I'm playing through wine (kegworks) on OSX but its no fairytale over here. TF2 over wine literally performs worse than native TF2 on my old dual core 2012 mbp. I'm having to use low resolution configs again. CS2 works OK but there are severe lagspikes that ultimately ruin the gunplay (a little more tolerable when it happens in tf2 but its there too). About the only game that works well in this setup for me is Mount and Blade: Warband. But I mean its a 2010 game... I can't even play bannerlord because of anticheat. Can't play chivalry 2 because anticheat. Can't play cities skylines 2. Most games that do work seem to struggle to get 40fps even on m max series macbooks. I'm not sure where the incompatibility is but its got to be in the software layer software given the specs on those max macbooks. I just wish someone actually cared about this stuff at Apple. GPTK is not that useful. Rosetta 2 has some serious performance throttling going on somewhere in it (why is native macos cities skyline fps locked at 40fps...). Former mainstay native macos game devs from 10-15 years ago have zero interest publishing for the platform today, valve included.
• wiz21c 11mo ago
  It'd be nice to have the publisher of the games...
• givemeethekeys 11mo ago
  Between Windows being so unbearably bloated and no way to make anti-cheat really work on Linux, it looks like the consoles win!
  • _cenw 11mo ago
    Or you could miss out on like... 5 games. Competitive games on a controller would be a much larger trade off than dual booting to me.
    • donatj 11mo ago
      On Xbox at least Keyboard / Mouse support is decent. I played Fortnite and Minecraft this way for a while. Personal preference, but I'd far rather have a separate device dedicated to gaming than my kernel hacked by anti cheat. https://www.purexbox.com/guides/all-xbox-games-with-mouse-and-keyboard-support https://www.purexbox.com/guides/all-xbox-games-with-mouse-an...
      • int_19h 11mo ago
        The problem is that consoles also tend to have much worse support for modding.
      • _cenw 11mo ago
        The only games on that list that doesn't run on Linux I can spot are Call of Duty and Fortnite.
  • doener 11mo ago
    No modding and higher prices of games on consoles though.
    • givemeethekeys 11mo ago
      This is a big, missing piece for sure. I suppose for competitive games though, it's okay to not be able to mod, and for everything else, we have PC's.
• drnick1 11mo ago
  I used to dual boot, but I that there are so many games on Linux, I just don't buy or play incompatible games. So EA lost a BF6 sale for being assholes.
  • teroshan 11mo ago
    Same situation here. If it were last year, I may have caved. But at this point I don't want to bother with dual booting and losing my Linux context as I do so. Instead I'm playing ARC Raiders which works perfectly on Linux and I don't regret a thing.
• __alexs 11mo ago
  It's funny that game makers make a fuss about anti-cheat not working on Linux but then publish Switch versions of their games. That platform has almost zero security and is commonly emulated with cheats even in multiplayer these days.
  • j-bos 11mo ago
    This. Even kernel level anti-c-spyware can't stop a cheap vision model hokked to a mouse, see youtube for examples from simple auto input up to full on elctromuscular stimulation.
    • huflungdung 11mo ago
      [dead]
    • embedding-shape 11mo ago
      Based on the latest report from Dice/EA/BF6, seems indeed like they're detecting hardware-based cheating as well: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2807960/view/497213442478833989 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2807960/view/4972134... Although who knows, they might be outright lying about that just to scare cheaters, but I tend to default to assuming what they're saying is more or less true.
      • orbital-decay 11mo ago
        Looking at the accessibility alternatives they suggest, they were probably detecting XIM users, not the much nastier PC stuff like DMA cards.
      • archerx 11mo ago
        They can’t detect me splitting my hdmi output, feeding one of them to a separate machine with a vision model to detect what needs to be detected and the same machine moving and clicking the mouse. People are already doing this.
        • 11mo ago
• sylware 11mo ago
  kernel anti-cheat are notoriously inefficient and are weaponized by hackers.
  • tete 11mo ago
    In still doesn't prevent a wide array of cheating.
    • sylware 11mo ago
      It is more a anti-(non-steamOS)-linux than anything else.
  • super256 11mo ago
    Are they? Cheats for games like Fortnite, CS (Faceit), Rust, LoL have become very expensive (100 USD per month are not unheard of) or require you to purchase special hardware. And I have yet to come across an anti cheat driver of the big publishers (EAC, Faceit, Javelin, Vanguard) being exploited and allow access to r/w kernel memory. It is more likely that the driver of some hardware is being exploited for, rather than anti cheat drivers. Personally, I only remember the ac driver of Capcom ever being exploited. Compare this to the dozen hardware/av drivers which were exploitable, like the Intel LAN utility driver, ASUS IOMap64, MSI NTIOLIB or that one Razer driver. Oh, and CPU-Z and the Avast Hypervisor driver were exploitable too and allowed r/w on kernel memory. These drivers are way more likely to be weaponized than ac drivers.
    • vablings 11mo ago
      The thousands of RGB drivers from the various manufacturers that are just copy+paste jobs on RWEverything is actually disgusting and Microsoft letting that just happen is a serious problem. Ah yes you added AES to your IOCTL very secure! I'd say the only reason that these drivers haven't been exploited is because of the insane bug bounties in place. There are also other big issues in games, see the whole hack with Apex Legends lmao
    • torginus 11mo ago
      I remember the anti-cheat of Valorant being exploited where basically the hackers could turn a bug in the game code into full kernel-level root access via the anti-cheat. Video games are not engineered to withstand sophisticated hacking attacks which is fine mostly since the bad guys can only use their access to cheat - in this case they could fully compromise your system thanks to the kernel access of anti cheat
• phoronixrly 11mo ago
  Thank you, I prefer my Linux without rootkits.
  • EasyMark 11mo ago
    Same here, I don't need any game so badly that I compromise my security unnecessarily. I'll just play something else.
• Jhsto 11mo ago
  Cheats aside, are there any competitive games that include Uber-like rating system? Meaning that you'd need to provide feedback whether you'd play with your opponents/teammates again after a game.
  • silvanocerza 11mo ago
    Dota 2 comes to mind, they have the commend system. If I remember correctly they added something like this to CS: GO too.
    • super256 11mo ago
      Pretty sure the commendation system in CS is just for looks, as it can be easily gamed.
  • Insanity 11mo ago
    Yes to some extent, I believe “The Finals” asked to rate how each match went in earlier seasons. But that stopped now that the game is more mature and feeling well balanced. Cod MW2019 would occasionally ask, but once every X game IIRC.
  • kreco 11mo ago
    The idea of someone rating me, or rating someone else makes me anxious. I'm not sure it would be better than just reporting people with undesired behavior.
    • Insanity 11mo ago
      I think it’s more anonymized like “did you enjoy the game with this team (1-5)”
    • gilrain 11mo ago
      > The idea of someone rating me, or rating someone else makes me anxious. But not enough to avoid, as you’re here.
  • Rucadi 11mo ago
• tete 11mo ago
  Well, that's just silly. Hook up a Raspberry Pi as your keyboard, mouse input and video output and all the anti-cheat fails. Same (largely) for VMs, same for many emulators. And if nothing works you can always build a robot pushing mouse, buttons, etc. Of course you can raise the bar, but if anything has been shown it's that cheating is not something that anyone has been able to prevent yet. In many situations you can also interfere on the packet level. Of course maybe you need to extract some key, but in many situations that's not exactly hard. And then you can hook something into network.
  • kimos 11mo ago
    The cheating isn’t just about input speed or accuracy though. It’s about seeing around corners or having knowledge about other things in the game that you can’t see on the screen.
  • short_sells_poo 11mo ago
    They already do this. Including peripherals which appear as an actual mouse, but they are there only so that cheat software can take control of the input without modifying the game memory. There are cheats which run on a separate machine and access the game memory via a dedicated DMA card (which itself presents itself as an innocent piece of hardware). Note, this can still be detected either via detecting the DMA card itself, or eventually these shenanigans will be killed off by IOMMU. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of offerings which do not touch the game memory or process at all, and work purely based on image recognition and these days they actually use AI that is trained on specific games. I have no idea how they plan to detect these. All the cheat needs is the video feed and the ability to provide input via mouse and keyboard, and as you say this is trivial to do in a way that is entirely undetectable.
• 999900000999 11mo ago
  I'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot... I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware. I don't need gaming that much. And if I do I'll stream it with Gamepass or another cloud service.
  • jmuguy 11mo ago
    All I really do on my Windows system is play games, and because of that I don't mind whatever draconian crap that's required to keep cheaters in check. It sucks, but not sure of a better solution.
  • gishh 11mo ago
    Just get a ps5. I went through the same adventure.
    • Gracana 11mo ago
      I did that for years and I recommend it as well. Pure linux desktop + console for games is a nice combo and a good separation of functions. Of course... at this point I am back to having a PC with a beastly GPU and I boot Windows for games and CAD. It is hard to resist high framerate 4k gaming once it becomes a possibility, so now I need to figure out the secure boot problem for the occasional game that requires it.
    • limagnolia 11mo ago
      A PS5 is an even more locked down system! There are vastly more games, many I already own, that work on Linux.
      • bigstrat2003 11mo ago
        I don't personally have a problem with a system being locked down in general. I have a problem with my computer being locked down, or getting rootkits installed on it. So for me at least, playing those games on console is a good solution.
• Barry-Perkins 11mo ago
  [dead]
• bflesch 11mo ago
  As most of you know, these anti-cheat systems are functionally equivalent to rootkits. There is zero visibility into how these privileges are used for targeted attacks. Due to geographic location of the large game companies this has a geopolitical angle. Fingerprinting of devices and the networks they are in provides a lot of metadata that is most definitely fed into their intelligence apparatus.
  • pmarreck 11mo ago
    I remember trying to install Valorant for the first time, and its ridiculously invasive anticheat kernel mod (or whatever it's called) gave me my first blue (or was it red??) screen I'd seen on Windows in years. Immediately uninstalled it and haven't ever played Valorant to this day. Fuck that crap, if your community is so toxic that you need a rootkit to keep cheaters at bay, then maybe it's more of a community problem than a technological one. And yes, if this means that you have to block all of China in order to do so, then that is still a community problem. Put your rootkits on your Chinese servers, separate them out, and let the cheaters fight amongst themselves.
    • xeonmc 11mo ago
      Is it any coincidence that such state is from the same company behind League of Legends?
    • philipallstar 11mo ago
      > if your community is so toxic that It's nothing to do with a toxic community.
      • ohdearnopls 11mo ago
        It might not be the sole reason (and most likely isn’t), but toxic communities breed these sort of behaviours, especially in games that are extremely hostile to casual players.
  • surajrmal 11mo ago
    Unpopular opinion, but we would be better off with a single open trusted implementation of anti cheat (aka drm) which can attest whatever requirements are desired by the game is met. The only real problem is that it would likely be limited to approved kernel images and someone would need to own that validation and signing infrastructure, but you could imagine having multiple trusted entities have this role.
• kamranjon 11mo ago
  At this point - you would think that cheaters could be detected on the server side by either training a model to flag abnormal behavior or do some type of statistics on the movement patterns over time - is a client-side anti-cheat really required?
  • pmarreck 11mo ago
    I don't believe there's a foolproof way to do this. It's basically the usual cat-and-mouse game of an arms race.
  • Lalabadie 11mo ago
    That's because the 2025 definition of "anti-cheat" leans heavily towards preventing players from enjoying client-side content that's locked behind microtransactions (for example, EA's new Skate game).
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  • wavemode 11mo ago
    Many forms of cheating revolve around modding the game locally so that certain textures can be seen through walls, so you always know where opponents are. So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions. The obvious solution would be, just don't send data to the player's client about enemies that are behind walls. But this is a surprisingly hard thing to engineer in realtime games without breaking the player experience (see: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-valorants-fog-war https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-..., and then notice that even in the final video wallhacks are still possible, they're just more delayed).
    • Quimoniz 11mo ago
      > So you aren't breaking any laws of physics, you are just able to make much better tactical decisions. With respect I'd like to disagree on this subtly. A lot of games have the client send their cursor position at relatively frequent updates/packages (i.e. sub-second). So the server knows pretty precisely in which direction and to which object a player is looking. This in turn can be readily used upon when using wall-hacks, as most players, who use wall-hacks tend to almost faithfully follow objects behind walls with their cursor, which good moderators can usually spot within a few seconds, when reviewing such footage (source: I was involved in recognizing Wall-Hacks in Minecraft, where players would replace textures, to easily find and mine diamonds underground).
• LanceH 11mo ago
  Amongst the discussion of rootkits and anti-cheat, I would like to add that part of the reason it is necessary is caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers. It used to be pretty easy to just ban people from playing, now we're 100% reliant on their ability to do it. So we have anti-cheat which roots our computer, and still doesn't 100% solve the problem.
  • sofixa 11mo ago
    > caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.
    • afavour 11mo ago
      I never ran a server back in the day but I still benefitted from community run servers where decisions about banning were done by volunteer admins. These days with centralized servers it has to be automated.
    • galbar 11mo ago
      For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source. Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further. IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.
    • squigz 11mo ago
      > Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? Let's put it differently: What % of people among those who program are interested in maintaining open source software? A very low %, and yet it's a thriving ecosystem. To bring it back to gaming: How many people who game are interested in modding, or creating models/maps/etc? Again, a very low %, and yet...
• nolroz 11mo ago
  It's so disappointing that the halo master chief collection still doesn't support split screen. Nothing compared to the joy of playing halo with friends in the same room.
• Buttons840 11mo ago
  The only multiplayer game I currently play is Beyond All Reason (a RTS game). It's a free and open-source game, so creating a cheat client would be especially easy. But I've never encountered cheating. I think there's a few reasons for this: 1) The playerbase is small and there is no auto-matchmaking, just a traditional list of servers. This results in the same group of people always playing together. People don't want to cheat when they're playing with acquaintances they see frequently. 2) Spectators are allowed in every game. The top-ranked games usually have several spectators. You might think this would result in even more cheating, but in practice the spectators would prefer to watch a sneak attacks succeed, because it's funny. It's boring to be whispering the enemy secrets to you buddy on a private Discord, it's more fun to watch your buddy die in a surprising and funny way. Also, the spectators can spot if a player does something that suspiciously well timed or lucky. The spectators see all, so they have the information needed to spot suspicious behavior. 3) Official servers create an official record of what happened in every game. The entire community has access to all the recordings. If someone thinks cheating is happening they can link to the official game recording on Reddit (or whatever) and everyone can see what happened. 4) An active moderator team reviews every report of cheating. There are official moderators that do the banning, but also volunteer moderators which can watch the recordings and create a trusted written account of what happened; this makes the official moderators have an easier job.
  • ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
    Seems more likely that the cause is that RTS isn't a popular genre among gamers and Beyond All Reason is obscure[1] even among RTSes. There's no fame or money to make it worth investing in cheating. [1] Among the general public, not RTS aficionados. Which is unfortunate; Total Annihilation and its spiritual descendants like BAR deserve more love.
    • Buttons840 11mo ago
      People have been banned for cheating, so cheats exist.
      • 11mo ago
• MisterTea 11mo ago
  But can it run Crysis? No. Not on Linux :-( I actually really liked Crysis for its open maps where you can approach a goal using different tactics. It had a lot of flaws and I hated the alien ship along with everything after as it was way too linear. Though I really want to play it again but alas, no more Windows for me.
  • ooterness 11mo ago
    Actually, ProtonDB indicates Crysis runs just fine on Linux. https://www.protondb.com/app/17300 https://www.protondb.com/app/17300
    • MisterTea 11mo ago
      I have never gotten it to run on Linux, even with tweaks. However I gave up years ago so maybe I should give it a go and see if anything changed.
• cornichon622 11mo ago
  I don't understand why multiplayer games don't run more on the server. If the server runs the game, then sends to client only what it needs to display the game and play sounds, the client doesn't have more information than necessary and a whole class of cheats is eliminated. There is no need for a client to know where an enemy player is if the player won't be shown on screen (wall hacks). I think World of Tanks runs this way, and I've never encountered much cheating on there.
  • ttimebomb 11mo ago
    Some do, but its much more expensive for game companies and adds latency to some elements. Its generally a much harder problem for first-person shooter games - an enemy might be hiding behind a wall but the game needs to know the position of that enemy anyway because the player might move around the corner and see that enemy before the server updates or their game client might need to play noise that enemy is making faintly even if they are far away. Players of these games are sometimes running their games at high framerates like 240fps which is much higher than the tick rates of these games too. Plus it doesn't solve all the possible cheats that are out there, as there are some like aim-hacks that don't need any server information to work.
• jillesvangurp 11mo ago
  It will be interesting to see how this evolves. It used to be that game developers could safely ignore Linux. But with a growing number of Steam OS, Steam Deck, and Linux + Steam users gaming, it's going to get increasingly more painful in terms of revenue to be telling those users "our game only works on Windows" and just miss out on the revenue and deal with the angry users, forums full of users complaining the game doesn't work, etc. It might only be a few percent of overall users. But a few percent of a billion $ is a couple of tens of millions. That's a steep price to pay for anti-cheat code.
  • hamdingers 11mo ago
    Most game devs can continue to ignore linux and trust that proton will work it out. It's only the highly competitive online games that have this issue. While they make up a lot of playtime, they're worked on by a tiny minority of developers.
  • pjmlp 11mo ago
    They are still ignoring Linux, hence why Valve is using Proton, the validation they failed to convince studios to care, studios that happen to target systems like Android NDK, or use platform agnostic engines.
    • simoncion 11mo ago
      > They are still ignoring Linux, hence why Valve is using Proton... Eh, maybe? I'd put forth the notion that game devs might be caring how their game works on both Windows and Proton. That is, that they're still using the Microsoft-provided APIs to build their game, but care about how it runs on Linux just as much as how it runs on Windows.
      • pjmlp 11mo ago
        Not really, otherwise you would be getting SteamOS native builds. It is up to Valve to sort it up, they are the ones that care, otherwise they will need to pay Windows licenses, which is really what this is all about, while pretending to be some kind of white knights.
• lwansbrough 11mo ago
  Anti-cheat is a necessity for an enjoyable game experience. If you are a casual who doesn’t care about game integrity, you probably aren’t the target audience. I don’t want any cheaters in my games. I don’t care if a rootkit is required. Riot has a kernel level anti-cheat and it’s _really_ good. It’s so good in fact that it deters most cheaters from even trying. This is the dream for anyone who wants fair games.
  • cortesoft 11mo ago
    I agree with you, but I think the best solution is just to let people run the game without anti-cheat, but they can only play with other people who also opt-out of anti cheat (or choose to allow themselves to be matched with people who opt-out). Then people can choose to either accept they have to install a rootkit anti-cheat, or want to risk facing cheaters in return for not having to install the anti-cheat.
  • nottorp 11mo ago
    > If you are a casual who doesn’t care about game integrity, you probably aren’t the target audience. Friendly reminder. 90% of games are not competitive multiplayer and don't need any anti cheat to be enjoyable. My main entertainment is video games and books (no TV) in equal proportions so I'm far from "casual". I play zero competitive multiplayer due to the "communities" being invariably toxic. Last time I played something like that it was Starcraft 2 when it was new. Enjoyed being called a stupid noob when I won.
    • simoncion 11mo ago
      Yeah. I've found a nearly 1:1 correlation between "Does it try hard to be 'competitive' or an 'e-sport'?" and "Is a huge section of the playerbase just godawful toxic assholes?". As the years ground on, I've learned to avoid games billing themselves as an "e-sport" or indicating that they are extremely focused on the "competitive" scene, unless there's something very compelling to offset the asshole players that will inevitably be pulled in.
      • 11mo ago
• wetpaws 11mo ago
  I have a simple answer for you - just don't play games that require any significant level of anticheat. 100 times of 100 you are not missing anything.
• nicman23 11mo ago
  nah thanks. i remember my vista install getting destroyed by securom
• kgwxd 11mo ago
  It's a perfect litmus test as far as I'm concerned. If a company believes it's ok to put things like that on my machine, I don't want them anywhere near it, even if they were to "compromise" to work on Linux. Relying on a users machine to snitch on them is dumb at every level. Fix your hearts or die.
• miroljub 11mo ago
  I cant believe some people still insist calling it GNU/Linux.
• waterTanuki 11mo ago
  One would hope that Microsoft will eventually revoke kernel access to these companies (see, Crowdstrike incident) eventually forcing game developers to support Linux for many popular online service games and actually stop being so lazy with anticheat. Somehow a smaller studio like Embark managed to make Arc Raiders compatible with Linux. I have 95 hours into the game and have not encountered 1 cheater. Yet a mega corp like EA can't possibly afford to support BF6 on Linux because of kernel anticheat. I put only 10 hours into bf6 and got killed by aimbots three times.
• zeroq 11mo ago
  Main problem with highly competitive games is that you can run them inside a container and have full access to memory. Most games will share all the data with every client which makes it trivial to display positions of every enemy on the map. It's just convenient for developers. In games like Tarkov, once you spawn in, your client gets all the information that possible - positions of players, their names, equipment, contents of every single container on the map. Tarkov is not the best example, because the netcode is terrible, and the architecure is a joke - you can loot everything on the map with a keystroke, and kill anyone with another, but other games are not better. Even in Valorant, which makes an extra effort to only send data relevant to the player - ie. data about player that you are about to see - you can use that to see around the corners.
• rolandog 11mo ago
  The framing of this is, in my opinion, wrong. I'd like to be able to play unranked matches in spite of the anti-cheat system (which is probably a an anti-piracy enforcer) not working. I play games to have fun; yes, cheaters suck the fun out of matches, but so does anti-consumer "anti-cheat" software that impedes playing the actual game.
• mock-possum 11mo ago
  As someone who never plays online games with randos - mostly single player, or multiplayer with friends - I cannot stress enough how much I do not give a shit about anti-cheat, and how thoroughly fed up I am with poorly conceived and ill executed malware being installed on my computer, holding games I own hostage in the name of stopping cheaters that I don’t care about it. Anti-cheat should be opt-in.
• immibis 11mo ago
  Fundamentally anti-cheat is made to ensure you're running the game in genuine Microsoft Windows. If you're using Wine, you're not. They could check for genuine Linux, except that isn't actually a real thing, so they can't. Maybe on SteamOS.
• mindcrash 11mo ago
  If you really want to play games with anti-cheat with a Linux machine right now you could also try cloud gaming, or to be exact Nvidia's Geforce Now - because most of the smaller cloud gaming services like Shadow PC and Boosteroid simply run Windows Virtual Machines with GPU passthrough on which kernel level anti cheat... you guessed it... does not work. Nvidia is publically advertising that five games from the Call of Duty series (notoriously known for their kernel level anti cheat) and Battlefield 1, 4, 5, 2042 and the very recent Battlefield 6 (same) are able to run on Geforce Now (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/). There's even a native client for Linux thanks to their recent Steam Deck support (you only need to hack a bit since it's basically optimized to run on SteamOS KDE and Steam Big Picture mode which is quite easy thanks to Google search, and you should be pretty much good to go). Another option would be Moonlight/Sunshine (https://moonlight-stream.org/ https://moonlight-stream.org/, https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine) but that option requires you to have a pretty beefy game PC or server w/ decent GPU next to your Linux machine to host the games.