Psyonix ending Rocket League support for Mac & Linux

Psyonix have announced their intention to end support for Rocket League on Mac and Linux some time in March. The game will be issued one final patch at that point, cutting out all online functionality and leaving just offline game modes for those players. Other platforms are unaffected by the announcement.

The move is a consequence of their plan to “upgrade Rocket League with new technologies”, which apparently makes it “no longer viable” to support Mac and Linux platforms. The reasoning for this is not made clear, with Rocket League having been built on the cross-platform game Unreal Engine 3 and having had Mac and Linux support since 2016 through this.

Needless to say, people affected (and plenty of those that aren’t) are fricking furious about this, and Psyonix don’t exactly have the best options for users to follow. Essentially, if you own the game on Mac or Linux, you also have a license for Windows. You can play Rocket League on a Mac using Boot Camp and a license of Windows, or use Steam’s Proton app or Wine to translate the game for Linux, which comes with a major performance penalty.

Another course of action suggested by Psyonix is simply to ask for a refund. Psyonix_Devin said on Reddit:

Hi everyone, if you are playing RL on macOS or Linux and are interested in a refund, please contact our Customer Care team here: https://support.rocketleague.com/

So what’s changed and what possible new technologies could Psyonix be referring to? Well, Psyonix were bought up by Epic in May 2019, making a number of business model changes to remove things like loot boxes from the game. It’s feasible that they intend to shift the game engine from Unreal 3 to Unreal 4, but Unreal 4 still happily support Mac and Linux platforms. The game uses PhysX for physics, but that’s also compatible across platforms.

The most likely looking culprit is Easy Anti-Cheat, the anti-cheat framework owned by Epic since the end of 2018. It’s not clear if Easy Anti-Cheat is compatible with Mac and Linux at this time – it seemingly has support, but is not in a mature state – but if Psyonix are trying to replace the existing anti-cheat with that of their parent company, that could be what’s cutting off non-Windows players. Of course, none of this matters on PS4, Xbox One or Switch.

Source: Steam Community

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