Are we so desperate that we want what is basically malware ported to Linux? Ew. I didn’t tolerate that shit when I was running Windows, and I’m sure not going to start now.
I’ll just keep on voting with my wallet, and not pay money for such user-hostile products.
Why is this the hot take? Have we not learned from Cloud strike?
The current “anticheat” is literally just the malware industry. Companies develop a anticheat and then the cheaters develop something to break it. The longer this goes on the more invasive the anticheat gets. It is a losing situation where the end user loses.
Can’t we just have machine learning models running server side to detect cheaters or something? Why do they need to be so invasive
It feels like a chicken and egg problem for sure. I firmly believe that people should be able to cheat all they want. Trying to stop cheating just creates more incentives.
Then online games would be unplayable. It’s not a chicken and egg problem, pretty sure cheaters came first.
I’m not saying I support kernel anti-cheat just that I want all games to work on linux.
unfortunately for us, I don’t think we’re what they would consider “significant”
The steam deck be pretty popular these days.
We need the game publishers to face more consequences for neglecting a significant segment of the market
MacOS?
(please don’t hurt me, it was a joke.)
Yes, Apple should face consequences for making game development for MacOS so difficult.
As long as it’s not Android
This is like the people who give recipes bad reviews because they swapped the eggs for banana and it didn’t bake right.
Yeah instead give it 0/10 cause checks random steam review Marver rivals crashing randomly.
But fuck linux users for rating a game bad cause developers made a deliverate descision to block their system cause “all linux users are cheaters.”
So, I imagine that the person you replied to would agree that’s also a bad reason to rate a game.
Indeed. If you buy something and it doesn’t work, or it’s shit, or contains greedy monetisation, that’s fair enough. Downvote away.
But the requirements say Windows, you can’t really complain when it doesn’t run on Linux. It’s complaining that a banana doesn’t taste like an apple. Indiana Jones isn’t out for the PS5, but I haven’t gone and given it a bad review because of it…
There is no reason to ever rate a game badly. If it runs poorly or not at all youre the moron for using banana instead of tomato. If you don’t like it cause the game is not good, its your own fault for making a dish following a curry recepie when you hate curry.
You lost me at “no reason to rate a game badly”
Missing /s?
Or are you legitimately saying there are no bad games?
If it doesn’t run it’s your own fault?
If you think it’s badly designed, bland and uninspired, that’s on you?I was clearly stretching the analogy of the person I was replying to show how bad it was.
Dear friend, context clues should clearly indicate their comment is sarcastic.
Thank you.
I thought so, but I’ve heard even more deranged takes said with full sincerity
no reason to ever rate a game badly
Go and play Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing and then tell me that again.
Really makes you feel like
Well it certainly doesn’t make you feel like a trucker.
Sure. Harassing developers always works. I remember when everybody did it to CDPR about The Witcher 2 so they fixed all the issues and made a perfectly working Linux version of The Witcher 3. They definitely didn’t swear off Linux completely.
Witcher 3 does work perfectly on Linux.
After Valve fixed it.
I dont disagree with this but i don’t know about significant segment, thats kind of delusional
Yeah, I’m Linux-only and have been for the last 17 years, but we are not a significant percentage of the gaming market. Still less than 3% last time I checked.
Otherwise, yeah fuck kernel anticheats that don’t even stop cheating.
There are dozens of us!
Yeah, I also wish they’d have better support, but Linux players are not a huge group.
Steam Deck and Steam machines have helped a lot though. Without Valve’s weight behind it, trying to game on Linux would probably be a lot worse.
I’ll settle for the old Rust approach, where you could still play on (or host your own) servers that didn’t have anti-cheat enabled.
We’ll sooner see linux supported anti cheat than we will server browsers.
anti cheat with kernel privilege access? No, thanks
Based.
SiGnIfIcAnT sEgMeNt
The steamdeck runs on Arch. Games with windows-only anticheat excludes millions of potential players.
We actually know this number. As per Steam’s hardware survey this group is around 2%, including Steam Deck players.
Best guess, Steam Deck sales are 5-10% of the Switch, which is in the same ballpark as that number, so they’re both probably right.
Wheter you want to count that as “significant” is up to you, I guess. I bet the impact is very different depending on the game, even for supported games.
When it comes to large corporations, they’re very risk adverse but will ruthlessly pursue every stray penny. It always bubbles up from the indie companies, so expect native Linux support for specifically steamOS so they don’t have to contend with the GPL and FOSS advocates by 2030.
As someone who has been gaming entirely on Linux for nearly two years: we don’t necessarily even need native Linux support for games, as often the Windows version runs better with Proton.
Nah, it’s always a cost/benefit analysis. If anything, many of them tend to be very shortsighted about fuzzy reputational impacts they can’t easily measure in dollars.
2% of users (and less of that in revenue, I bet, since some segment of Deck players will bite the bullet and play on Windows desktop anyway) may be worth salvaging…
…but only if it doesn’t cost you more than 2% in terms of additional dev cost or in terms of losing you players due to having worse security.
That math is debatable, but I guarantee it’s very likely how many of these decisions are getting made. Review bombing may or may not help there.
Negative reviews would increase the pressure. Every drop makes an ocean.
It does, but it depends on how many and how they emerge. If it’s a review bombing campaign it’s more likely to get moderated out or ignored. If it’s an organic thing it’s more likely to be perceived as a genuine PR problem. And in any case it depends on how many people are actually complaining. 2% can be a lot of people if the overall number is big, but if the game in question has a serious bug that’s a lot more people willing to write about it than… you know, whatever percentage of 2% happens to be Linux-focused enough to go write a review.
I guess I’m trying to impress that a lot of people play games and of those a fraction get activist and of those a fraction play on Deck or Linux desktop and of those a fraction are going to complain.
The best path to solving this is less a review bombing campaign and more having a larger audience that is just obviously profitable to support. That one is mostly on Valve, Lenovo and the rest of the official SteamOS adopters, whoever they end up being.
Well, and on finding a reliable solution for proper anticheat on Linux that keeps it as secure as at least Windows, let alone consoles.
Correct, the reason I gave a 5 year window is because the investment into Linux support is tiny right now so they don’t accidentally cut into the quarterlies.
Hah. You may have accidentally come up with the new “this is the year of Linux Desktop”.
“Five years from now is the year of Linux gaming being financially relevant short-term” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though.
Honestly, I don’t have any predictions on this. So much is riding on how hard Valve is willing to invest on becoming a OS company and how receptive end users are to it. Right now the outcome falls somewhere between “Steam Machines” and “Nintendo Switch”, and I genuinely don’t think anybody can predict where in between it will fall yet. At the very least we need to see what happens to the Legion Go S and SteamOS adoption.
I’m speaking with industry knowledge on the state of gaming. It’s coming.
There are 3.2 billion video gamers in the world, and 1.17 billion play online.
“millions” is a couple percent. (As seen in the steam survey as well as napkin mathing the numbers from above)
Call of Duty is the biggest fps game in the world, every year. Their playerbase is “only” in the millions, so I suppose you agree with the executives that it’s not nearly successful enough?
No, because they are above the average video games market share.
But you can’t argue that Linux gamers are a significant market share, just because the number in front of the % is the same lol
Ok so if you agree that their playerbase of millions marks a successful game, then why do you consider the possibility of millions of players insignificant?
It’s not absolute but relative.
Because for each individual game dev, linux gamers account for on average 2% of their sales, which is insignificant.
Linux gamers are spread across all of the games and game devs.
Every person excluded from a purchase is money lost in the eyes of corporations. It’s why boycotts work when they’re properly organized. It’s why microtransactions are usually less than $5. I’ve been in corporate meetings for game companies before, I was recently illegally fired. The addition of Linux support is coming, but the big corporations need motivation to do it quickly.
There’s that “I never vote because politicians do not care about the issues of people like me anyway” attitude again.
(Hint: They don’t care because your kind won’t vote anyway.)
Good point!
That’s also a symptom of first-past-the-post only giving people 2 realistic options when we should really have more under mixed member proportional.
I was was going to make a post around the same lines, but in thought it through and in all fairness even in countries with Proportional Vote (the only true Democracies, IMHO) such as The Netherlands, there are still people who won’t vote because “all politicians are liars”, because they feel their vote won’t make a difference or simply because they can’t be arsed to go vote.
There are fewer of those than in semi/fake-Democratic countries and those who do vote actually vote in a positive way (to do something) rather than negative one (to block something), but there still are people who think “all politicians are liars” there.
However I do agree the previous poster’s metaphor doesn’t at all work outside fake Democracies with Mathematically rigged systems such as FPTP like the US.
I always vote.
But when I vote for a minority favourite, I don’t go around saying that all other parties ignore a “significant portion” of voters.
As for games, I also always vote with my money.
Oftentimes I buy games (and not even play them) just because they have a linux native release. But I still don’t think linux gamers are a “significant portion” of gamers.
So stop with these kind of baseless accusations, where you conjure up a non existing correlation from your ass.
as much as I love not running windows on my machines, this is 100% pure copium
also this post sounds really petty and it’s really sad if this is what the broader Linux gaming community really thinks, can they seriously not just ignore AAA games given how shit they are?
It’s not petty to use your voice to vocalize your displeasure. The squeaky door gets the grease.
And here I am, not giving a fuck about competitive online PvP.
Casual games require it too
The lengths people go to prevent cheating in single player games is astonishing. I’m really glad Paradox finally allows achievements on modded installs of their games.
“Sir, a significant market segment says we’re ignoring them.”
“Are they still giving us money?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then fuck 'em.”
“In which hole sir”
We need the game publishers to face more consequences for shoving BS kernel level anti-cheats and not focusing on where it actually matters, server-side.
(Which would also solve the Linux AC problem by extension)
how do you actually tell in server side if a client is e.g. actually good at a game vs playing recorded moves with a bit of randomisation when you don’t have access to into on what’s actually happening on the client device?
as much as I love Linux this sounds like purposeful partial blindness from hopium/copium
You’ll never catch all cheaters no matter what you do. All the kernel access in the world won’t stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.
A solid robust server-side solution and well architected server-client system will stop 99% of cheating. And no, Kernel AC is not part of a “well architected” system.
It’s, at best, a bandaid for a shitty server-client system that introduces a shit ton of privacy and security issues for everyone that uses it. Shit needs to stay out of the kernel unless absolutely necessary, and that goes for Linux, Windows or MacOS kernels.
Almost every blue screen/Kernel panic I’ve dealt with was traced back to some shit hooking itself into the kernel where it didn’t belong. And absolutely fuck third-party antivirus that hooks into the kernel too.
All the kernel access in the world won’t stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.
I guess that’s true, but that’d be a lot difficult to program and expensive to use compared to a simple program that can read data straight from the game’s memory in machine readable format and send inputs straight into the system’s input framework. by raising the entry bar you’re effectively decreasing the amount of people that will cheat in the game
it’s ultimately the user’s decision if they want to sacrifice the purity of their kernel for a game like this, and I think it’s their problem if their kernel panics for them wanting to play slop made by AAA studios
This is becoming less true for FPS every month - the described method of cheating (off-device reading and input simulation) is becoming more accessible as more cheat makers are selling premade devices that do this. Huge problem even for new shooters like rivals - someone was already caught doing it in one of their ingame tournaments. It’s the primary way people cheat in League of Legends, and it would not surprise me to see evidence of it in dota 2(though I haven’t personally, I haven’t been paying attention to it for some years and it isn’t as frequent that a variety streamer or youtuber plays it compared to lol).
As mentioned before, kernel anticheat won’t catch these guys anyway, so it’s largely just a way to alienate your user base. There’s a new problem it does nothing special to solve.
In addition to what @[email protected] covered on the first part of your response
it’s ultimately the user’s decision if they want to sacrifice the purity of their kernel for a game like this, and I think it’s their problem if their kernel panics for them wanting to play slop made by AAA studios
That’s absolute horseshit, the average gaming consumer doesn’t know shit about the kernel, what it even is or the implications of running Kernel AC. They might know their game has AC, but chances are they won’t even know what kind to make this kind of informed decision.
I mean DMA (direct memory access) devices are only like 170 bucks now:
https://www.dma-cheats.com/dma-cards
These are almost impossible to do anything about even client-side because they operate on a hardware level.
In general state-reading hacks (like invisible walls and Gameworld state information hacks) are almost impossible to do anything about, to the point where when companies are able to find a way to defeat one of these things it’s huge news.
oh damn I didn’t know you could do direct memory access like that, that’s so wild
One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user’s input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there’s some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).
Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn’t be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can’t see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?
Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it’s a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won’t catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton’s f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it’s even more sensitive to sample rate.
Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.
That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.
I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).
Game publishers: but server-side anticheat is
more expensiveHARDDDDDDMost games I know about do both, but my understanding is it’s hard to stop some of the client-side stuff server-side.
Look, we’ve been here before. I’m not super invested in multiplayer stuff, so I don’t care that much, but I am old enough to remember when gamedevs would not even try crossplay and just let the PC be the wild west when it comes to cheating.
I didn’t necessarily hate it. I lived in a world of dedicated servers where moderation and security came down to some kid in his underpants being pretty sure he didn’t like you and kicking you out. I’m guessing there’s a bit too much money and too much of an expectation of free-form matchmaking for the mass market to go back to that.
But hey, I’m not a security software engineer and I’m not excessively involved in competitive shooters, which seems to be where most of the problem happens. My interest in this is having enough PC security for crossplay to make matchmaking in fighting games less of a hassle than it used to be in the Street Fighter 4 days. You sweaty FPS nerds can do whatever, as far as I’m concerned.
Cheating could potentially also include console players. All consoles have been jailbroken and all it takes is sufficient interest to have someone make cheats that could be injected on top of the running game.
You’re right on all accounts, I oversimplified for humor. Server-side IS more expensive and does exist in limited ways. Rolling matches on dedi servers are highly profitable, unfortunately the old school days of matchmaking are over for everything except indie companies that want to replicate the nostalgia
I’m not sure extortion is the best way to get companies to support Linux. I think market share is the only real metric they care about.
I mean if the game you paid money for is deliberately broken to shaft you, you are a clown for reviewing the game positively. Judging by the complaints of every game with linux-breaking anti cheat, it remove any of the cheaters anyway.
