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.
I wouldn’t expect the Machine to be any more popular than the Deck, which already wasn’t enough to convince holdouts. In fact I would bet the Machine will sell much less than the Deck, since that had a more unique niche carved out for it.
I think the hope isn’t that “maybe this will be big enough”, but “maybe together they’ll be big enough”. Who knows, though. It got a lot of hype on reveal but people are fickle sometimes.
I would not be surprised if the work they’re doing here would be compatible with the Deck. It was just less of a priority for a handheld than a living room machine.
If devs want to support one, it’ll be no problem to support the other. But I doubt devs who already refused to support one will suddenly change their minds.
They refused to support the user space anti cheat. The work they’re talking about doing here is aiming to be the same sort of security they get on Windows. Low level. I have no idea how that works with Linux’s software licenses, but they said in the interview that this might be an exception made only for SteamOS.