The Finals

The Finals is a free-to-play 3v3v3 first-person shooter framed as a high-production televised gameshow, built in Unreal Engine 5EngineUnreal Engine (Epic Games)Epic Games' Unreal Engine is the most widely used engine in big-budget PC games. Versions 4 and 5 power a substantial share of the modern competitive shooter market, including Valorant (UE4), Fortnite (UE5), PUBG (UE4), The Finals (UE5), and Delta Force (UE5).20 games in this family → by Embark StudiosPublisherEmbark StudiosEmbark Studios is a Stockholm-based developer founded by former DICE leadership, a Nexon subsidiary since 2021. Its titles The Finals and the 2025 extraction-shooter hit Arc Raiders use Easy Anti-Cheat for kernel-mode protection, layered with behavioral input analysis and, on Arc Raiders, a limited Denuvo Anti-Cheat rollout.2 games in this family → in Stockholm. It launched at The Game Awards in December 2023 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. The studio was founded in 2018 by Patrick Söderlund and other veterans of DICE and the Battlefield series, and that lineage shows: the headline mechanic is physics-driven environmental destruction, with arenas that can be reshaped, dropped, and rebuilt during a match. Embark publishes the game directly and ships regular seasonal content as a live service.

"Discovery" is Embark's internal project name for The Finals, so the process in your task manager is named after the codename and not the game. That mismatch is normal here, not a warning sign. On a current Steam install the game lives at steamapps\common\The Finals, and the build Vera has observed running is Discovery\Binaries\Win64\Discovery-d.exe. If you see that suffixed build together with a Denuvo Anti-Cheat service under Program Files, you are on the Denuvo path; a plain Discovery.exe from the same folder is the shape the game had before the split. Either way the kernel component runs only while the game is open. If you play on Linux, SteamOS, or a Steam Deck, Embark has stated it does not plan to drop support, so treat a sudden anti-cheat launch failure as something to report rather than something settled. And if you want to know which anti-cheat had access on a particular night, the honest answer is not a memory of what the game used to ship: it is the record of what your machine actually ran.

The Finals asks for a kernel-mode anti-cheat, and Valve's store page carries the required disclosure in four words: "Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat." What makes this title worth reading closely is that the answer to which one is no longer singular. The game launched on Easy Anti-Cheat, in the Epic Online Services variant that also handles matchmaking and identity, so the easyanticheat_eos.exeProcesseasyanticheat_eos.exeEasy Anti-Cheat for Epic Online Services (EOS variant)Open plate → daemon is the one you see in a process list. EACAnti-cheatEasy Anti-Cheat (EAC)Easy Anti-Cheat is one of the most widely deployed kernel anti-cheats in PC gaming. Founded by Finnish company Kamu in 2006, acquired by Epic Games in 2018, and bundled with Epic Online Services. The kernel driver loads while a protected game is running. User-mode daemons EasyAntiCheat.exe and EasyAntiCheat_EOS.exe are catalogued in the Field Guide's processes section.18 games in this family →'s kernel driver loads while the game is running and unloads when it closes, so it is resident during play rather than at boot. In game version 8.0.0, announced on October 23, 2025, Embark began rolling out Denuvo Anti-Cheat as an addition to EAC rather than a replacement for it. Denuvo Anti-Cheat and Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM are separate products from the same company, and Embark has said it is taking the anti-cheat one only. The client split along with it, and this is where Vera can add something the public record does not have. Vera's observed-process census recorded a real session of The Finals running from a build named Discovery-d.exe inside the game's Discovery\Binaries\Win64 folder, with a Denuvo Anti-Cheat service process, published by DENUVO GmbH and installed under Program Files, running in the same sample. Sessions on the same machine before the split ran a plainly named Discovery.exe from that same folder. So the executable your machine is actually running is what tells you which of the two products is protecting the match. We can name the Denuvo-path build because we have observed it running. We do not name a filename for the EAC-path build, because we have not observed one, and the community Linux tracker that follows this most closely was still working out the same question from the outside. In kind, the trust ask has not changed: a vendor-signed kernel module loaded during play and unloaded afterward. What changed is that there are now two vendors who can be the one holding that access on any given night, and which one it is depends on the build you launched.

Embark Studios is a young developer, founded in 2018, and The Finals is its first shipped game, so the long-form publisher track record is short. Embark has been majority-owned by the Korean publisher Nexon since 2019 and fully owned since 2021. On the anti-cheat side the studio's record is one of adding layers in public: the October 2025 Denuvo rollout was announced rather than shipped quietly, and Embark paired it with a stated commitment to keep the game playable on SteamOS and the Steam Deck, telling PC Gamer there were "no plans to drop support for SteamOS." Coverage of the rollout and that commitment ran in PC Gamer, GamingOnLinux, SteamDeckHQ, and KitGuru. The studio has also acknowledged in public, as TechRadar reported, that a bug had been preventing it from banning cheaters efficiently. The most-discussed editorial issue around launch was Embark's use of generative text-to-speech for in-game commentator and contestant voices, including ElevenLabs-based pipelines. The studio has defended the approach as a tooling decision built on top of recorded human performances, while voice-acting professionals and parts of the player community pushed back. We note the practice without taking a side; readers who care about it should weigh it directly.