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

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...

This is an economic problem, not a technical one. From the article:<p>&gt; “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.<p>For many products, there&#x27;s not currently an economic incentive to support Linux because the development cost, support cost, and opportunity cost outweigh the potential revenue. I&#x27;m sympathetic to this because it&#x27;s something I face with my own product. In many cases, the Linux market currently isn&#x27;t large enough to justify the cost, but I hope that changes in the future.

The guy isn&#x27;t wrong. On the other hand though, it raises a lot of questions about how he manages to serve the Android&#x2F;mobile community that&#x27;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&#x27;t you enable EAC through WINE? Is your product really that insecure?<p>In any case, I don&#x27;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.

That&#x27;s fine, I&#x27;ll continue not purchasing games that require Windows.

There&#x27;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).<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s only valid if their anti-cheat rejects all Windows hypervisors and also checks the integrity of the Windows kernel (in this case it&#x27;s still of course not secure, but the anti-cheat itself would need to be patched to defeat it).

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

FTA<p>Angry Tweeter: “Newsflash: CEO does not trust his own product”<p>Tim Sweeney: With regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite&#x27;s size, YES THAT&#x27;S EXACTLY RIGHT!

I&#x27;m not sure if this is an unpopular opinion, but: Cheating in online games is not a problem.<p>We have essentially two cases to consider:<p>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&#x2F;annoying to get into a state where competitve queuing is possible.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re getting into lan territory where the hardware setups are either provided or checked.<p>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.

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