Goodbye to Roblox on Linux with their new anti-cheat and Wine blocking

Hot take, but it's a parental failure to let kids communicate in a meaningful way with strangers via games. This is why DS and Wii multiplayer were so interesting, you could play with strangers, but had canned responses for comms for the most part unless people added the friend code of each other, at which point they might be able to voice chat or use text. You could only share a friend code if you could communicate outside of the game.

Where there's the means to talk to kids properly, you'll find predators. That's a given.

It's also bold to assume that these are children playing Roblox on Linux, when they are in all likelihood actually adults.

But would supporting a Linux client bring in more money than it costs? I remember reading claims from other software projects that Linux was an insignificant percentage of their user base but a majority of their support tickets.

"Never trust the client" applies to human beings, too.

Roblox can't trust the clients — human beings — to be adults about gaming. This is completely correct. Cheating is attempted by a percentage of all human adults, in all human games, without exception.

Linux has no capability to attest to the server that it is enforcing protections against interference by human beings; on memory, on processing, on graphical outputs, and on human interface inputs. Linux, by design, allows human beings to modify anything they wish to do, up to and including cheating. This is by design, and conflicts directly with any efforts to prevent cheating.

The entire invasive anti-cheat / rootkit software trend exists solely due to the lack of secure attestation from chip-to-app. macOS has for many years had the ability to boot software in fully-attested "no modifications are present" mode, chained from the hardware TPM chip, to the signed kernel, the signed OS image, and the signed application itself. Gaming consoles have been doing this for years, and Windows 11 — which requires a TPM chip — will support this as well, same as Windows 10 optionally does in little-known enterprise configurations.

So, someday, a few years from now, multiplayer games that are interested in preventing cheating will simply will stop accepting connections from clients who are not able to provide chip-to-app attestation that they're running an unmodified environment, with neither debuggers nor DLL injections permitted.

I expect that Valve either has, or will, implement TPM-backed secure attestation for their Steam Deck's default boot-up into Proton (which is currently based on Linux). Once they do so, I expect Roblox would then be willing to consider Linux again. Until then, they have no reason to: Linux, by ethical standpoint and code design, trusts the client.

(I recognize that HN is generally hostile to considering how secure attestation might end up widely adopted and demanded by games and other applications, but the ship has already sailed. I’m just trying to yell “iceberg” and get the Linux community to face what’s happening and form a useful strategy in response.)

Exactly. It's the typical BS excuse game companies have been trying to use for over a decade, and nobody should believe it. Linux gamers are not looking for "support". They want a binary. And a server that doesn't actively thwart them because of their operating system. That's pretty much it. And thanks to cross platform development getting easier and easier, that binary is in more and more cases trivial to produce.

I like your attitude.

I think it is the opposite. These companies are run by experienced businesspeople who know what platforms have a positive ROI and which do not.

>it seems that running an anticheat is greater priority than a linux client

Yes. Unless you have a better way of mitigating the cheaters, you'll find this to be the preferred choice by almost everyone. In this bubble, people are going to decry the loss of control. But in their market, the problem has gotten so bad, that not doing so would rapidly evaporate their entire product.