Even gamers nexus’ Steve today said that they’re about to start doing Linux games performance testing soon. It’s happening, y’all, the year of the Linux desktop is upon us. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
Edit: just wanted to clarify that Steve from GN didn’t precisely say they’re starting to test soon, he said they will start WHEN the steam OS releases and is adopted. Sorry about that.
the biggest wall imo is still getting companies with anticheat games on board.
Let’s be honest here, they only care because when someone inevitably fucks up, people will think the fault is with windows.
IMO, no one should be playing games with kernel level anticheat. There is no way I would let any big gaming company have that level of control over my PC. It’s a security nightmare.
If gamers were buying in their best interest nintendo would be bankrupt, there is what gamers should do and there is the real world. The sad reality is that only the low end gamers care about vanguard and they aren’t paying the bills in riot
After that huge “Salt Typhoon” hack against major telecoms, you’d think people would take “security nightmare” a little more seriously!
Truth is though, your average Valorant/League/Whatever player probably isn’t even aware of it running when they smash through ok -> ok -> agree -> yep -> accept -> accept -> ok -> play.
Any kernel-level anything connected to major corporate servers should be scary and taboo, but except for the alarm-raisers who know what they’re talking about, most people don’t even understand the implications.
I’m glad Steam is at least marking a big “This game requires kernel level anti cheat” on store pages now. It looks ugly, possibly scary, so maybe that’ll raise some awareness and make developers not want to go with it.
I wonder if Valve will eventually offer their own system of checks similar to Google Play Integrity? I don’t think I’d care for it since it’s an invasion of personal choice on a device that you own, but for people who want to play competitive games with cheating problems, running a partition with integrity checking seems a fair trade.
Yeah you can do most of that server side but they don’t want to pay for it. Why pay when your players let you coop their machine for free or even better yet pay you for the privilege. Also player run dedicated servers would fix all of this. Don’t like the cheaters movement servers. Own the server ban them. We had this working just fine in the 90s.
It does often feel like as soon as a significant hurdle is overcome, the industry just makes another one.
Hopefully SteamOS/Steam on Linux gets enough traction to force publishers to reconsider.
And with every step it’s getting better. 10 years ago almost no games were natively supported and you needed to fuck around a lot to start anything with wine and most didn’t work anyway. Nowadays everything just works, and the only category of games that doesn’t is that slop with kernel level anticheat.
The improvement was monumental.
It’s true that a big slice of gamers play games with anti-cheat solutions that don’t work on linux. That said most of those aren’t even on steam, which is the biggest pc game marketplace, so I’m not sure it’s that big of a dealbreaker for that many people.
you don’t have to onsider off platform titles on its own. just take proton DBs list and sort by playercount and youll have your handful of misses on some of the top currently played titles. that already filters the non steam games already, and it still has its small handful of titles not on board yet.