GoKawiilUbisoft have announced that their third-person hero-based melee fighting game FOR HONOR will be blocking all SteamOS / Linux players on September 10th.
The game uses Easy Anti-Cheat which is currently enabled for Linux, but they plan to disable it - making it another game that will no longer be playable across Linux Desktop, Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
In an announcement on the official site they said:
"To reinforce a fair competitive environment, the team is introducing additional player safety measures. We are removing For Honor from the Linux platform to ensure a safer environment for our players as we cannot meaningfully deploy protection on this platform. This means that For Honor will no longer be playable on Steam Deck starting September 10th. We will continue to investigate different ways to improve our anti-cheat with the possibility of reopening the platform in the future."
A real shame - any game that intentionally blocks Linux is a loss for the platform. We've seen the same in the past with the likes of the Battlefield series, Apex Legends, GTA V and more listed on our anti-cheat page.
Hopefully Linux will continue pulling in more gamers and grow, so that these bigger publishers will one day be unable to just block Linux. Or perhaps Valve will be able to do something about it so publishers have some kind of system that they feel is good enough to secure their games from cheaters.