Game developers and cheaters have fallen into an endless struggle of updating and bypassing. This war has raged on for so long that devs have had to resort to specialised tools to prevent the use of exploits like wall hacks and aimbots. Easy Anti-Cheat is one such tool used by a number of developers, and Valve has announced that it will be supported by the upcoming Steam Deck.
An update by Valve reads: "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."
Easy Anti-Cheat is one of the biggest anti-cheat services available to developers. It's used by the likes of Apex Legends, Fortnite, Battlefield 2042, Black Desert Online, Dragonball FighterZ, For Honor, and New World among others.
Cheating and hacking in multiplayer games has become a growing issue not only for players, but also the developers, who have to constantly push out updates and ban cheaters. Most recently, Halo Infinite's crossplay feature was labelled "unplayable" due to the sheer number of players using exploits to rack up the kills. This resulted in console players asking the devs for the option of opting out of crossplay in order to avoid being in the same servers as the hackers on PC.
These hackers not only use cheats themselves, but also sell them to other players. Developers have been using all means to curb this, including legal. PUBG Mobile publishers Tencent and Krafton recently won a lawsuit against a group of hackers who were peddling cheats, resulting in them having to pay a massive $10 million fine. The hackers seemed to have made a successful business out of it, as police officials recovered cash and luxury cars. They were also ordered by the court to inform the developers on all their methods so that they could be safeguarded against.