Apex Legends blocks Linux, claims “meaningful reduction” in cheating

Michael:
[0:00] EA’s back in the news this week with some updates from Apex Legends. They released a video. We’re going to react to the video and give you some more information about what’s going on. And yeah, let’s just jump into it.

EA:
[0:10] We’re also tightening up the matchmaking restrictions to keep games feeling fun and fair. On the anti-cheat side, this is a never-ending battle. So we’re continuing to roll out new tools and technologies to better identify and ban bad…

Michael:
[0:24] Unless you use Linux, they’re not rolling out anything.

EA:
[0:26] …actors, while also making it harder for cheaters to get into the game in the first place. A couple of months ago, we blocked Linux access to Apex and we’re pleased to report that we’ve seen a meaningful reduction in the amount of cheating recently, which we hope you are feeling too.

Michael:
[0:44] A meaningful reduction. That is the most useless thing to say, meaningless thing to say, because you’re not providing any details, any data related to what constitutes meaningful, like how much did it change and what changed and that sort of thing. Now, they did share a sort of information, not exactly, in December about some stuff related to the anti-cheats, but not really there either.

Michael:
[1:11] But let’s take a look at that. It says, in this chart, we’re displaying the infection rate or the rate of matches that had a cheater present. While several variables can impact this, we can see a noticeable drop in infection rate of the Battle Royale matches when we blocked access to Linux. We also launched season 23 with additional defensive measures that helped contribute this drop-off.

Michael:
[1:32] How if you’re, see, this is, first of all, this isn’t a great example of doing terrible experiments. If you are creating an experiment that you have, you want to know the answer to a question, and you have multiple variables happening at the same time, you don’t know what caused the change. That’s why this is not how science works. So when you’re going to do an actual experiment, you would say, okay, we’ll give it a month. We’ll say we’ll block Linux and then a month later, see what happens. Instead, they said that they launched season 23 when they blocked it. And also there’s a bunch of additional defensive measures. So did you actually do something different or was it directly Linux related? We don’t know.

Michael:
[2:15] Probably, probably not. Now the graph shows that 33% drop in infection rate at the bottom when they launched S23 or Season 23 and removed Linux support. So, this is an interesting graph because we have no idea how many infection rates this actually means. We don’t know any real data because, of course, they’re not going to provide that because that means that they’re going to have to prove their claims and then…

Michael:
[2:43] Who likes proving claims? And you can also notice that this graph is already falling off in terms of the amount of cheating that’s happening. So you can see that there’s a 33% drop in infection rate. And that’s also already happening. So they’re already doing things that caused it to drop. So there’s a skewing situation right here. And then you’ll notice that despite Linux being gone, the infection rate is now climbing. And this was in November, so it’s probably climbing even more at this point in terms of the percentages of however they decide this is being like,

Michael:
[3:24] you know, whatever criteria they’re using because we don’t know what it is. So back in October, they announced the removal of access for Linux gamers and they said some interesting statements. They said that in our efforts to combat cheating, we’ve identified Linux OS as a being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game. I mean, obviously, Linux OS is not an actual thing. Linux based OS is sure. While this will impact a small number of Apex players, who knows what that number actually is.

Michael:
[4:00] They did not say. We believe the decision will meaningfully, well, meaningfully. Interesting you use the same exact phrase.

Michael:
[4:10] Huh. Didn’t notice that until just now. So you’re expecting a meaningful reduction. And then in the video, when you talk about it, you say a meaningful reduction. Huh. It sounds like you plan to say this regardless of whether it happened or not. That’s just how it feels on the

Michael:
[4:32] surface to me they also go on to say that the openness of the linux operating systems makes it an attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers linux cheats are indeed harder to detect and the data shows that they are growing at a rate that requires an outside level of focus and attention from the team for a relatively small platform so this is a a horrible take. This is a bad take because it doesn’t make any sense. The openness of the system does not have anything to do with it. Like it’s free to play the game. It’s free to get these cheats. It doesn’t make a difference. Now, the only difference is that they have. I don’t know if…

Michael:
[5:10] If apex legends has their own anti-cheat which would be horrible because why would you do that but they might um i’m pretty sure they use easy anti-cheat or something like that but those work inside of proton so i’m

Michael:
[5:23] not really sure exactly what the problem is but there are also cases in which cheats for windows os get emulated as if it’s on linux in order to increase the difficulty of detection and prevention if that’s the case which is terrible if you want to say that there are cheats that are made specifically for linux that are somehow bypassing it then i don’t know personally to because i’ve not played this game to any degree to know anything about that.

Michael:
[5:47] And i don’t cheat i don’t care so i never looked up cheat options um but to say that the windows os getting those cheats being emulated.

Michael:
[5:56] That’s that’s nonsense because they’d have to run through proton and they have to go through wine and the easy anti-cheat and stuff like.

Michael:
[6:04] That inside of proton and that’s highly unlikely highly unlikely to work because even a slight modification to proton or wine will trigger these anti-cheats so that’s not likely to be true now the other part i don’t know but that one feels very unlikely they also go on to say that we had to weigh a decision on the number of players who were legitimately playing on linux the steam deck versus the greater health of the population of players of her apex while the population of linux users is small their impact infected a fair amount of players games what actual data do they provide that you guessed it nothing nothing so they’re ultimately they’re deciding that linux is bad and therefore block it and this should help in reducing cheaters they claim now they’ve said since they’ve done it that they’ve seen a meaningful reduction which again is kind of weird that they use the exact same phrasing as they did when

Michael:
[7:06] they expected stuff to change now i’m not going to pretend that linux gamers are 100 non-cheaters i’m not going to say that there’s not at least a few there’s probably some what percentage that is who knows they won’t tell us but they claim that there’s a 33 drop in infection rate which if you look at it in a different perspective that there are 67 of the people who are doing it are windows users not linux.

Michael:
[7:33] That’s not a significant amount. That’s not a meaningful amount because the vast majority are not doing it on Linux. More importantly, they’re saying that this happened while also implementing a bunch of other anti-cheat mechanisms. So who knows if it’s actually Linux related or if it’s this new season that

Michael:
[7:54] had something to do with it. Anyway, this is over the course, this 33% reduction is also over the course of a week. And then the next week it started going back up and up and presumably

Michael:
[8:06] up because they haven’t given us any information since then is this drop caused by linux being blocked or is this drop caused by 70 loss of their player base so forbes is reporting that apex legends lost 70 of its steam players in 2024 they said over 2024 apex legends showed the biggest drop in overall steam concurrent players the game has ever seen from a high of 470,696 in february of 2024 to 140,830 at the end of december and it’s still going down with 122 122,776 as of yesterday from the post of this article and i think this was very recent i’m pretty sure yeah this was only like a couple weeks ago so.

Michael:
[8:59] Over the course of one year they lost 70 of the player base over 300 000 of people stopped playing this game and instead of you know having some context of saying like maybe we’re losing a ton of players and therefore a lot of players who are cheating are going away too let’s just blame it on linux even though we also

Michael:
[9:26] did other stuff at the same time so what does this mean well we don’t really know exactly what the cause is they’re not going to give us any information because that’s just not what they do and also the the rhetoric that i noticed inside of this post compared to um about the meaningful reduction and then they use that same verbiage when they talk about the actual reduction. That seems sus. You know, that’s pretty sus.

Michael:
[9:56] But I think the silver lining here is that.

Michael:
[10:01] They’re not actually providing any proof, any evidence, any real data to suggest that this is actually happening. And I feel like that is some evidence, maybe not distinctive, definitive evidence, but some evidence to show that that’s not true, that they’re not seeing a reduction or a meaningful reduction because they block Linux. But rather they’re not showing us any data because they know the data is not good enough and they also didn’t show us any data about like why like how many people who were cheating supposedly versus how many people were actually on using linux to play the game or the steam deck or whatever they didn’t give us that information either and now when they give us an update it’s a single sentence that uses verbiage that they already

Michael:
[10:47] were planning to use and already had used So the silver lining for me is that we suspected that this is all just some marketing play to pretend that they’re doing something, even though they’re not really.

Michael:
[10:59] And also, I feel like they’re trying to save face because up until this news came out and I started researching it, I didn’t know that they were losing this many players. And I feel like they’re just trying to, like, you know, plug a hole in the leaky boat and hope that they can make it keep, you know, they can save it and that sort of thing. Because at this rate that percentage of you losing 70 in one year that’s gotta hurt so they’re just.

Michael:
[11:27] Grasping at straws to figure out you know some way to pretend they’re doing something to stop the cheating or doing something to get people to play it again and that sort of stuff so, the silver lining is i feel like you know this is not this is a good example

Michael:
[11:41] of using linux as a scapegoat rather than actually proving anything happened. And while this doesn’t solve the problem of not being able to play this game on Linux, there are some other games you can play. Counter Strike 2, for example, which is another free to play first person shooter or Xenotic, which is another free to play first person shooter. Or you can play any of the other 16,000 games that are available for Linux gamers on Steam. And there’s also so much more. There’s so much great games that we have available to Linux thanks to Valve and Proton and all the effort they’ve done like so yes Apex Legends is not available to play on Linux but there are a lot of games that are and a lot of games that recognize Linux is not a problem unlike Apex Legends and EA because for some reason you know I mean it I feel like they’re just trying to use us as a scapegoat but who knows

Michael:
[12:36] when ea first announced the terrible decision to block linux from playing apex legends i covered it here on this channel and more in depth so if you’d like to get some more details some backstory about what happened you can check out this video right here.