- The developer has no obligation to support the platform, Valve provides and pins a working runtime and unless the game is redesigned from scratch (see: Final Fantasy XIV) it should work in perpetuity.
- Anticheat on Windows is also a joke unless it runs in Ring 0, which is literally impossible on platforms like Steam Deck (Flatpak Steam only runs in user space for security reasons). No self-respecting developer should write kernel mode DRM in the first place, though.
- It very well could be as simple as flipping a switch - in the case of Apex Legends, the game already ran perfectly fine but couldn't connect to servers without the anticheat library loading properly. When EA updated the anticheat drivers, the game worked fine on Linux without any modification.
Of course, nobody has a de-facto obligation to support Linux. The larger point is that it's deceptively easy to get your game working on 90% of the world's Linux systems, much more so than shipping to MacOS or console. If all the world's 'serious game[s]' won't run on Linux, than that makes it the world's greatest casual gaming platform :)
- The developer has no obligation to support the platform, Valve provides and pins a working runtime and unless the game is redesigned from scratch (see: Final Fantasy XIV) it should work in perpetuity.
- Anticheat on Windows is also a joke unless it runs in Ring 0, which is literally impossible on platforms like Steam Deck (Flatpak Steam only runs in user space for security reasons). No self-respecting developer should write kernel mode DRM in the first place, though.
- It very well could be as simple as flipping a switch - in the case of Apex Legends, the game already ran perfectly fine but couldn't connect to servers without the anticheat library loading properly. When EA updated the anticheat drivers, the game worked fine on Linux without any modification.
Of course, nobody has a de-facto obligation to support Linux. The larger point is that it's deceptively easy to get your game working on 90% of the world's Linux systems, much more so than shipping to MacOS or console. If all the world's 'serious game[s]' won't run on Linux, than that makes it the world's greatest casual gaming platform :)