The issue is that flipping that EAC switch means you're effectively disabling a lot of its checks, which is why not many developers want to do it. Maybe this will change as the Steam Deck becomes more popular.
> Our team has been working with Epic on Easy Anti-Cheat + Proton support over the last few months, and we're happy to announce that adding Steam Deck support to your existing EAC games is now a simple process, and doesn't require updating game binaries, SDK versions, or integration of EOS. Alongside our BattlEye updates from last year, this means that the two largest anti-cheat services are now easily supported on Proton and Steam Deck
> 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.
- 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 :)
Maybe Mr Sweeney should focus more on making an anti-cheat that actually works, compared to the dumpster-fire that is EAC.
Its functioning is spotty-at-best on windows, and when it takes issue with something on your system the troubleshooting is useless. At least Valorants’ anti-cheat will tell you what it doesn’t like.
Unfortunately this switch need to be flipped by developers / publishers of particular game and they dont cooperate too well.