Back in October 2024, Respawn announced they were blocking Apex Legends on Linux platforms (including Steam Deck). Apparently this has worked quite well for them.
It’s funny how EA is attributing their statistic to something can be strongly disproven. When looking at the given statistic they provided, they don’t specify the raw count of cheaters banned, but simply the rate. Even giving the generous assumption that EA’s statistics aren’t significantly flawed, they show an alleged large drop in cheaters bottoming out in the week of Nov. 4, 2024, before starting to rise up again. Does something else coincide with the rate of cheaters dropping in the week of Nov. 4? There is in fact something that does. Season 23 was released the fifth with a large spike of players being brought into the game. Without a more comprehensive statistic graph over several months, it looks like EA is trying to just capitalize on the fact that a large influx of players joining the game will drop the rates of cheaters momentarily, and then passing it off as evidence that Linux cheating was rampant. Quite disingenuous.
Without getting into more outright malicious possibilities as I don’t use Windows and cannot inspect how the application behaves on the platform, you could have things as simple like:
EA didn’t see Linux users as profitable enough to support long-term
EA/Respawn wanted an attempt to garner good will from the community by dropping support for a minority platform
It’s funny how EA is attributing their statistic to something can be strongly disproven. When looking at the given statistic they provided, they don’t specify the raw count of cheaters banned, but simply the rate. Even giving the generous assumption that EA’s statistics aren’t significantly flawed, they show an alleged large drop in cheaters bottoming out in the week of Nov. 4, 2024, before starting to rise up again. Does something else coincide with the rate of cheaters dropping in the week of Nov. 4? There is in fact something that does. Season 23 was released the fifth with a large spike of players being brought into the game. Without a more comprehensive statistic graph over several months, it looks like EA is trying to just capitalize on the fact that a large influx of players joining the game will drop the rates of cheaters momentarily, and then passing it off as evidence that Linux cheating was rampant. Quite disingenuous.
What are they getting out of it?
Without getting into more outright malicious possibilities as I don’t use Windows and cannot inspect how the application behaves on the platform, you could have things as simple like: