Soul Calibur VI is having severe issues on Linux – The Downsides of Steam Play/Proton

Earlier this year, Valve officially revealed a new version of “Steam Play”, which when combined with Proton acts as a compatibility layer that can allow Windows-only games to run on Linux.  

While this sounds good in theory, the system remains far from perfect, especially when anti-cheating mechanisms come into play. How will a game’s anti-cheating system react when it discovers that the game it protects is running through a complex translation layer and on an OS that it wasn’t designed to operate on? It is easy to see how things can go wrong here. 

Over the weekend, players of Soul Calibur VI has discovered that running the game on Linux can have major consequences, even outside of the open-source OS, with Windows users being greeted with a networking error. While some users have blamed this issue on DRM, it is more likely that anti-cheating software is the primary cause of this error, with the prevailing theory being that the accounts of Linux users have been banned from online play. 

At this time it is unknown whether or not these apparent bans are intentional or if they come as the result of a game bug. Even so, we wouldn’t recommend that gamers play online-focused games outside of their intended operating systems, as anti-cheating software has the potential to ban systems that use such OS translation methods instantly.