Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat now supports Mac and Linux

Epic has announced today that its Easy Anti-Cheat is now available for Mac and Linux developers. This will help with running games that rely on Easy Anti-Cheat, work on Steam Deck in the future. Easy Anti-Chat is used by popular games like Apex Legends, Gears 5, Paladins, The Division 2, Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Wildlands, Dauntless, Fall Guys, and many more.

Easy Anti-Cheat now supports Macs

Epic Games’ official announcement says the following:

Earlier this year, Easy Anti-Cheat for Windows games was made available to all developers, for free. Today, we extend support to Linux and Mac for developers who maintain full native builds of their games for these platforms.

Many games use Proton, which is a modified version of Wine and created by Valve and CodeWeavers. This tool helps in porting games easily to Linux, and any compatibility patches are also later added to Wine, which in turn helps improve tools like CrossOver, which is often used to run Windows games on Macs. Even games that are not officially ported to Mac can be run using CrossOver using emulation and compatibility patches.

To make it easy for developers to ship their games across PC platforms, support for the Wine and Proton compatibility layers on Linux is included. Starting with the latest SDK release, developers can activate anti-cheat support for Linux via Wine or Proton with just a few clicks in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal.

Of course, the biggest reason for this update is Steam Deck. The operating system on Steam Deck will be Linux-based, and Valve promised to improve Proton compatibility by working with anti-cheat software developers to ensure that competitive games like Apex Legends work fine for it, as they have massive followings.

This will definitely have a positive effect on games on macOS down the road since many developers have historically not ported their games to the platform due to a lack of anti-cheat software support.