One of the biggest contenders in the battle royal space is Apex Legends, and thanks to its use of Easy Anti-Cheat, Linux and Steam Deck, players have been able to play the game via Proton for years now. Something that many other high-profile multiplayer games block. However, all that stops now. EA and developer Respawn Entertainment are officially pulling Apex Legends support for the platform entirely due to cheating and exploit concerns.
"In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we"ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats," said EA in a community update post. "As a result, we"ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game. While this will impact a small number of Apex players, we believe the decision will meaningfully reduce instances of cheating in our game."
Despite being a small platform in terms of players, Linux needed an "outsized level of focus" to combat the cheats that were continuing to come out of it:
We had to weigh the decision on the number of players who were legitimately playing on Linux/the Steam Deck versus the greater health of the population of players for Apex. While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games. This ultimately brought us to our decision today.
The openness of the operating system makes it an "attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers," according to EA. Some hackers had gone so far as to emulate their Windows cheats "as if it’s on Linux" to make it harder for the detection teams to catch the culprits.
Following the immediate decision, Linux users can no longer access Apex Legends, which means Steam Decks with the default operating system on them are now locked out of the free-to-play game, too. However, installing Windows on the device will once again make the game operational.