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 don’t know how many times I have to say this, but one more time: The vast majority of games work on Linux just fine! That number is only increasing.
Source? You say I need to provide sources. Where’s yours for this. This isn’t how Linux works. You can add and remove kernal modules at run time on Linux. This will not be OS specific, and it also won’t realistically address any actual issues that may exist and aren’t already solved.
It is not, on PC at least. The most played PC game is CS, and second is Minecraft, according to this. I’m not saying it’s nothing, but also it’s far from everything. The vast majority of hours played by people are on games that work on Linux.
This number is bullshit probably. If their AC can detect cheaters then they wouldn’t have this issue in the first place. You’re trying to tell me you believe they can accurately count cheaters but are also incapable of stopping them? Yeah…
It’s in the article that we’re commenting on right now.
“I think some of that work, by nature, because it’s so close to the platform, will have to be SteamOS specific… some publishers or some game developers will have to decide at their own rhythm if they want to do that work for SteamOS or not. But we’ve been trying to help in any way we can along the way.”
I don’t know how this works with Linux software licenses, but it seems to be something that they’re acknowledging they might have to do, somehow.
You’re right, I’ve got some double-counting going on in there. According to Mat Piscatella of Circana, 40-50% of all gaming hours on PS5/XS are spent on just the top 10 live service titles. Surely a target demo for the Steam Machine includes a portion of that, but these games really do represent a huge portion of the market, including on PC. You only need one of those games to be a deal-breaker for someone to make them decide that it’s not worth it to use a Steam Machine or switch to Linux. For instance, I’ve got friends that play primarily games that work on Linux, but if Destiny 2 doesn’t work, then they’re out, full stop. For another friend, it might be Battlefield, or what have you.
I don’t know Facepunch’s methodology, or that of their anti-cheat vendor, but often times they like to do bans in waves so as to not give away how the cheaters were caught. Again, given that they’re not the only developer to come to this conclusion, I have no reason to doubt their write-up. I can certainly disagree with how they’ve responded to it though. If it were me, I’d sooner put Linux users on a prisoners’ island or something than to outright just not let them play.