An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important information for a lot of people, especially if you’re looking for an off-ramp from Windows and still want to play some of the most popular live service titles.
Irrelevant to me personally but I’d like to see it cause more windows users to jump ship
I have no need for Steam products. Gaming emulators have been all I needed for years now. I don’t play the latest games so it’s totally fine for me too.
Speaking of irrelevant
Please make this optional. I’d rather not have any third party kernel modules mucking around in my OS. I don’t use anything the requires this.
It is optional what games you purchase and install
The article only mentions TPM not 3rd party modules. I’m guessing the idea is that you will have to run an approved kernel.
Kernel modules can be installed, loaded, and run without a reboot in Linux. TPM support would just ensure that the firmware/kernel and modules loaded at boot are expected.
Edit: basically, TPM support wouldn’t really do what a game dev would want for a kernel that can be modified at runtime, unless I’m missing something
Yeah, unless valve starts restricting root access when secure boot is enabled, you’re probably right.
This could be huge. I hope they find a decent middle ground.
This is a huge deal for Linux gaming.
On the one hand, I don’t give a fuck about anti-cheat, because games using the kernel-level version tend to be giant multiplayer cesspools of little value.
On the other hand, I want Windows to lose the war.
I hope Valve can find the balance between these two extremes.
Are they working on giving the worst and most useless companies kernel level access to my pc?
Perhaps. Of course, if you were able to type that sentence out, it also means you know what to avoid if that’s important to you. I will be, because it’s important to me, too.
I have this feeling that even if valve makes it work, rootkit anticheat devs will push updates that intentionally make it not work again. Probably with more claims like the majority of cheaters being linux users
They’re not just making that up. Cheaters migrated to Linux because it was easier to bypass the anti-cheat protections there. If the anti-cheat is equally effective in both operating systems, they’ll have no reason to cut off a portion of their customer base.
I would love to see actual sources for this. On both sides.
Every time I’ve tried looking up numbers (usually because of a passing interest, and never any level of in depth research) I’ve come back with interesting tidbits like “the total number of cheaters banned in one month was greater than the total lifetime number of unique Linux users of the same game (sometimes an order of magnitude or more greater).” With that statistic being pretty consistent across games and time periods.
Oh this might be what pushes larger companies to drop kernel level anticheat! That would remove the main reason that keeps my gaming on Windows.
Lots of games that ship with kernel level anticheat have an android port that doesn’t have that feature because android (also linux) similarly doesn’t hand out root access, let alone kernel access to anything in userland.
Huge example being Fortnite.
Already ignoring the fact that kernel level anticheats have well known bypasses, cheaters can also just use the Android version to make cheating easier if that was really an obstacle.
Anyone peddling kernel anticheat as a requirement is just using it to cut costs in running moderation staff. Epic Games specifically is just being a dick to linux because they know they have zero leverage in that market, and don’t want to give Steam more traffic.
All Valve really has to do is sell enough units to tip the percent of linux users that these publishers would not want to miss out on. That’s how so many updated and expanded with the steam deck. Currently the estimate is about 4 million monthly active users on a linux platform. I think if they can reach 10 million (I think 6-7%), it would be enough to incentivize the change.
I never would have thought Microsoft would allow Halo Infinite or MCC on linux 5 years ago, but they actually changed their minds because they knew people wanted to play on the steam deck. I would even take a guess that the new CoD stuff will shortly follow since MSFT is taking a more open platform approach anyway.
EDIT:
Here’s aiming to be hopeful…
I remember back when playing DRM video in a web browser on an open source operating system seemed like a worrying impossibility. Many sites stayed stuck on closed-source flash players for that reason alone. It was a while before we ended up with this solution I only partly understand - where the DRM decoding is handled through some kind of trusted block, that generally doesn’t have full OS control?
Do you get full HD video from streaming services these days? Last I checked, the best of them only top out at 720p without Windows.
Yeah I get 4k with Firefox on cachyOS
Interesting. Did this happen recently? When all of the streaming services starting raising prices, I started cancelling. Which ones give you full HD? Do you need to go out of your way to get there, or will regular old Firefox do the trick? Does it need TPM enabled or anything like that? I was looking to re-up Amazon Prime in the very near future, but when watching on my web browser, a show like Vox Machina was just a blur factory, and it was easier to pirate the show than it was to stream it legitimately.
If Valve can make wireless vr AND fix windows only anticheat, both next year, I’m going to be 10 different kinds of happy. I would love to basically never need my W11 SSD ever again.
Modern machines have TPM so we can do attested boot and validate a system hasn’t been tampered with. They don’t need third party kernel modules to test that.
The fix is to not use local anti cheat at all which is proven time and time again to be the wrong strategy. It’s stupid and anyone who makes local anti cheat is either stupid or cheap or both.
Surprised they (Denuvo, etc - not Valve) don’t just hard require SELinux.
SELinux protects systems from bugs in software. Not against users with full root privileges using their own hardware.
But anti-cheat is mostly about false sense of security anyway.
I consider it to be a function of when I grew up with video games and how my family restricted them broadly, but I have honestly never understood the appeal of competitive online games that require intense anti-cheat controls.
I grew up playing largely single player games, and the few online games I payed were limited to ones I played in private lobbies with friends i knew.
Any game that requires this level of policing for competitive play is an instant turn off for me. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I have no problem with a console that doesn’t support kernel level anticheat- to the contrary i find it to be a huge advantage
I get what drove us here. When you find a game that speaks to you and it’s got a ranked mode with good matchmaking, it’s easy to get lost in match after match, and cheaters can take the wind out of your sails. My competitive games of choice are fighting games, which are mostly free of cheaters and this invasive anti-cheat, but I’ll be bummed if it becomes the norm, because I won’t participate in that.
Are input macros in fighting games considered cheating or accessibility tools? I like the idea of learning fighting games, but with my thumb injuries, I literally can’t do the key inputs.
I assumed key input macros would be banned, so I never looked into this as an option. I remember hearing about upset when even official pressure-sensitive input controls on Dead or Alive 3 were banned in a major tournament in that game, let alone custom input macros.
People have all sorts of custom controllers with different button layouts. There are tournament legal requirements, but you’re unlikely to violate them if you don’t know what they are, and it hardly matters if you’re playing from home.
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Steam Input would work, I’m pretty sure. I think I could overload all the buttons on the back so that they do all the complex D-Pad stuff. I haven’t tested if this is possible, but I’m imagining something like: pull starting direction from the DPad, press button on back for quarter/half/full/shuriouken movement, then execute with face button. So, like, DPad-Left+R3+A does full roll starting from facing right, then A.
Alternatively, I could load a radial menu on one of the touch pads with specific moves to execute in one click, with DPad input auto-toggling switching between directionally-correct radial menus (or maybe L3 as a manual toggle or something).
There are lots of options… Maybe I’ll try and see what I can figure out.
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