Thank You, Valve
kinduff.com
kinduff.com
Definitely yes, but let's not kid ourselves. Valve is not doing this from the generosity of their hearts or love for the Linux community, or the gaming community, but Proton and the Steam Deck are their future insurance policy against Microsoft coming after their profits in the future.
The writing was on the wall, they saw how much money Epic was giving to Apple, and how many studios Microsoft owns, and with the direction Windows is going, in 10 years when Windows 12 drops, Microsoft could also push for a 30% cut on all Steam sales on Windows for example, and Valve is preparing themselves for such a scenario by pushing Steam to Linux full throttle.
They want to make sure they reap all the profits from the Steam store and not have to share they pie with a middle man like the Epic vs Apple kerfuffle. That's the end-game here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still very grateful for what Valve is doing for Linux, but it's important to be aware of the motivation behind the actions, consider their potential end-game, and not get romantically attached to companies as there is no free lunch and companies are not your friends.
Well yeah. That's what a company is. Companies are also people, and people make decisions, and those decisions are sometimes influenced by more than the mere bottom line. You can't read their minds, and it's the opposite of charitable to assume the worst.
Fully agree about the rest though. It certainly makes business sense. But it took around a decade to maneuver themselves into this position, and it's pretty hard to believe they did it all solely for the green.
I used to exchange MSN messenger messages with Zoid, one of their most productive Dota 2 programmers. (Boy that sounds like ancient history.) He didn't strike me as a person who was particularly ruthless and mercantile. Just a driven programmer trying to do good.
Edit: Tring to do good, and they made Dota 2?
The history of dota is pretty fascinating. As someone who worked on Heroes of Newerth, I can vouch that https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/ is pretty accurate, based on the reactions of all of my coworkers when it came out. So there's some juicy drama for you.
It's true that Valve makes decisions based on money. But it's also true that they execute on them fantastically well. Far better than S2 could ever dream to achieve.
It was wonderful to have a front row seat to the steamroller. In hindsight I wish I'd relaxed and enjoyed it more.
> your first realization was that Abdul was a poor designer
from here: https://icefrogtruth.blogspot.com/
is almost categorically false.
I've been playing Dota since... 2004, I was there almost immediately after the Eul/Guinsoo/Neichus stuff. I did research the previous versions a ton, out of curiosity.
There's almost no comparison between Icefrog's additions to Dota and what came before. The other versions were brilliant in their concept but generally very poor in their execution.
Icefrog added more brilliant concepts but primarily greatly cleaned up Dota mechanics and execution. He took an amateurish mod and made it have professional level execution.
Maybe he sucks to work with in a team (really hard to believe, to be honest, considering the development and testing team he built around Dota and the changelogs, OMG, the changelogs; I'd rather think he might suck to work in a on-site team, because his online team management was pretty solid), but criticizing his management/design of Dota for so many years is really silly.
I didn't say that I'm not happy for what Valve is doing, but I don't trust any billion dollar tech megacorp like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nintendo, Valve, etc. to have the best interest of the consumer in mind, regardless of how fun their IP is for my entertainment.
Pro-consumer actions on their end are always motivated by their internal Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy against their competitors, but ultimately they're not your friends, they're just fighting for your money and marketshare.
In the end, you're still just a dollar sign that pads their stocks or bottom line, regardless of some of how pro-consumer some of their actions seem.
Yes, everyone here knows a company does things for money, and I'm not knocking Valve for wanting to make money, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and try to think of what their end-game is, as that might turn out to be not be very consumer-friendly in the long run if they become a monopoly.
So what?
There is an elsewhere. Playstation, XBoX, Nintendo, GoG, Epic, Apple Games, Android. Network effects aren't anything to do with a company being your friend. You aren't staying through friendship with the company; why is it non-silly to criticise them for not being your friend?
While true, good luck living your life without dealing with a corporation.
In fact, you're a dollar sign for your next door shop as well.
That's the biggest problem in modern public corporations, a significant number of shareholders have no long term interest and will happily hurt the company to sell out with a higher number.
I hold no delusions that Valve is doing things for my benefit, but they have managed to position themselves in a place where their interests and the interests of PC gamers mostly align.
Gabe Newell is worth $8 billion courtesy of his ownership stake.
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/gabe-newell/
Monopolies in tech are pretty rare I think, especially things like online services -- it is pretty hard to completely dominate a market when there are other big tech companies out there and they all dabble in everything. However, tech companies engage in anti-competitive behavior all the time. Unfortunately people want to say "monopoly" when they see anti-competitive behavior, because it sounds cooler. This is quite unfortunate because it leads to the whole "technically not a monopoly" debate, which really misses the point.
Netflix had a monopoly, but now not, and it's shit. I have to work out what platform a show is currently streaming on, and decide whether it's worth paying for that to see the show, and the lineups are constantly changing. Honestly, going back to piracy for video is looking good right now.
The GP's statement "piracy is a service problem" is so true. And, unfortunately, to provide the kind of service we want, that means a single platform. I'm utterly uninterested in a world where I have to remember which platform that game was on. I refuse to buy games if they require Origin (or an Xbox account, or in fact creation of an account anywhere).
I realise that at some point Steam is probably going to become evil and take advantage of its monopoly position. I hope we can persuade it to stay honest when that time draws near. I don't see any other option - I wouldn't want the government (which government? I live in Germany) controlling the platform either.
Playstation, XBox and Nintendo all want a word with you first.
After that Fortnite and PUBG developers are waiting.
> Spotify has a near-monopoly on music,
ITunes wants a word with you too it seems.
> and both of these are working great for me as a consumer.
Good. That is because both Valve and Spotify know how vulnerable they are.
> Netflix had a monopoly, but now not, and it's shit.
Unlike Spotify they weren't humble.
They abused customers by enforcing the dumb rules of the film industry.
I'd almost say good riddance to them but it's not in me to enjoy others misfortune.
Gog, Microsoft, probably Funcom and a number of others (I'm not into gaming, I'm just pointing out he was extremely wrong, so wrong even I could see it. Or there is some missing context that I failed to see despite trying twice now in which case a clarification might be needed.)
Edit: Blizzard and Activision publishes outside of Steam (too)? (I don't know if the publish on Steam.)
Gog and Funcom are drops in the ocean in comparison.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/653926/music-streaming-s...
I'm starting to use GOG Galaxy for this reason, as it happily integrates with many of the services. I got shifted from my 'if it ain't on Steam, it doesn't exist' mindset by Epic giveaways (resulting in a single actual well discounted sale!) and later Gamepass. I'd still prefer a single service with everything for the right price though, but that will never happen while multiple groups are trying to deliver it.
I supported HumbleBundle's Choice, mostly because again they were either DRM-free or sold as Steam keys. Then it got weird and "here's 12 games you're never going to play" each month.
I'm not going anywhere near Epic (or the shitshow that used to be Blizzard) because I know they're just trying to break Steam's grip, and as soon as they do they'll treat their customers badly.
I seriously do not get why people think that companies do 'good' for any other reason than money.
Yes, they're clearly doing this to help the Steam Deck and other projects. I'm sure that will make them money and I'm sure someone at the company will do something with that money that people object to. That's just the nature of living in anything beyond a barter economy with humans. I think most people (especially on HN) get that. We don't need 5 people to pop out and remind us of it every time a company does something.
Unless it's obvious that there's a clear malicious intent hidden in what the company did, a lot of times it just feels like "How dare these people feel some joy. Capitalism must make everyone feel bad all the time."
That's 100% the reaction here every time Microsoft launches something benefiting devs and consumers. Everything is scrutinized with skepticism. Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards?
How do you think Valve would be towards consumers if they were to become a monopoly in the PC gaming sales space? Not knocking them, I'm just saying it's good to be paranoid when billion dollar tech companies are being too generous and benevolent with consumers, and not get romantically attached to these corporations.
I'm not saying not to be paranoid, but unless the point is just "people can't enjoy things made by companies" maybe save the actual paranoia for cases where it's clear that the action is going to be a big downside. There's no call to action except "don't talk about this" or "why are you buying things from a corporation?"
So much of it just feels mean-spirited to me. That there's literally no possible thing any company could do that wouldn't be spun as "well this is just good PR to cover up X evil thing they're doing." And that's maybe true, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage them to do good things and recognize them when they do them. It feels like a perverse joy in stomping on other people's happiness, even if it's justified.
It's like showing up at someone's birthday and reminding them they're a year closer to death and debilitating old age diseases. It's true, but what does anyone gain by doing that. Are people on this forum A. unaware of corporate malfeasance or B. able to be persuaded from their current position on its dangers? I'd say that's almost never the case here.
The issue is that you aren't pointing to anything actually wrong with what they are doing, you are just vague saying "They are doing it for the money", and implying that there is some bad thing that is happening, without saying what the bad thing is.
If Valve is doing some bad, then say so. But just because they are a for-profit company, it does not mean that every good thing they do, has some hidden negative side-effect that is unnoticed.
I've got plenty of bad things to say about Valve, but that's for another thread, where the topic is a bad thing they're doing.
Because companies are made up of people and people are capable of doing things for reasons other than money.
GOOD! That means our incentives are aligned, and the arrangement is much more likely to survive long-term.
Something tells me Kroger doesn't sell me food out of the goodness of their hearts either, and I'm ok with that too.
But instead, proton is open source, their OS is based on one of the most open distros out there and they published a tear down guide (not the best guide, mind you, but it's trillions of year ahead any competition on their space).
So yeah, they are doing it for the money, but they are one of the very few companies that understands that money come from users, and they seem to be doing very good for users.
So don't kid yourself, it's not only for the money.
It's about the level of the DVD CSS DRM.
"Piracy is a service problem." — Gabe Newell
You mean the best thing, right? <3 chiptunes
Not sure what you mean by this. Steam offers DRM, but its use is not enforced. There are many Steam games that can simply be copied to another computer and run even without Steam.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Valve contractor.)
Extra well wishes if you work on the general kernel improvements or KDE tech, that stuff has made my life more enjoyable for close to 20 years or so.
At this point, streaming to Twitch from my Sway desktop is working really well (thanks for that @emersion!), with the one frustrating exception of not being able to screen-capture individual windows.
The collection of games I end up playing is somewhere between special and weird, I'd say.
And, to get back to the topic, for people in a comparable situation like me, Linux is a great alternative. So if hear or read other people comparing pros and cons of Win vs. Linux (or Apple vs. Linux), and gaming was the major drawback, think carefully if that applies to you as well.
Having a pile of shame on Linux is as easy to do as on Windows, just it's smaller (which is good, right?). But having one at all means that you don't have a lack of games, but quite the opposite.
Of course, when you deeply into AAA and big franchises, and need to play a game when it's published and everyone talks about it - then probably not.
I dunno. The kind of games I like (puzzle-like, simulations, calm strategy) was mainstream once. At that time, the majority of the popular games was interesting.
My tastes change in that I'm way more receptive to reaction games than I used to be. But not enough to prefer them. What places me on the same position you are on, but my actual tastes didn't change much since childhood.
I feel similar. I usually play slightly older AAA games with the bugs ironed out, indie or AA, or games 5-20 years old based on the amount of interesting looking mods available. Reliving games from your childhood with quality of life improvements, new game modes, campaigns and better graphics is a blast. Browsing the most modded games on ModsDB or NexusMods is great for inspiration. /r/patientgamers is good too.
So many AAA developers and publishers are pushing out nonstop cash grabs with no respect for players, especially with sequels in previously beloved franchises. EA, Rockstar, Ubisoft etc are all at it. It was inevitable when gaming became so mainstream and more profitable than Hollywood.
It's not always perfect (looking at you, borderlands 3), but it works in a vast majority of games I've played. If gaming is a reason preventing others from stepping into Linux based on experiences from even two years ago, definitely check it out again -- it's night and day. It's been incredible to see how quickly they've been able to make Linux completely viable for gaming.
Now about my productivity..
I must not have hit this yet - my girlfriend and I recently started playing through after finding it cheap on Greenmangaming, and it plays fine. Neither of us have super powerful PCs, just 6600XTs, but the level of bugginess (such as the game jumping to default monitor every so often) is about what I would expect for Windows too given how complicated modern games are.
The worst outcome of this is that the market share and quality of Vulkan implementations will diminish. WebGPU is a strong upcoming API contender on the mobile side, which IMO has a good chance of displacing Vulkan for many applications. And if DXVK works that well on Linux, more developers might end up choosing DX12 and only supporting Windows. Giving up autonomy and becoming a subordinate of a different technology stack is never a good idea. I mean, if this is the way how the Linux community wants to play, then why not make it official and just scrap Vulkan and have a DX-compatible API in place with IHV drivers?
And of course, let us not mistake Valve's intensions. They couldn't care less about Linux users. They are simply leveraging Linux as a low-cost platform to get into the console business.
I can now play many games directly on my linux laptop without tinkering with anything. It's fantastic and has done more to make me optimistic about linux as a desktop / gaming platform than anything else.
I don't see how this gives Microsoft more power, if anything it takes it from them. People are not dependent on Windows to run Windows games, and developers can target Wine directly if they wish.
> And of course, let us not mistake Valve's intensions. They couldn't care less about Linux users. They are simply leveraging Linux as a low-cost platform to get into the console business.
I've been watching Valve since the beginning and that's not quite how I read it. I do think they're pretty neutral on Linux, that much is true, but in general Valve has consistently fought for openness in gaming. Pretty much anyone can sell on Steam, Valve will let you bypass the 30% cut and sell Steam keys on other stores if you want, they created the OpenVR SDK while Facebook did everything it could to close theirs, etc. Their moves on Linux aren't about having a console, it's about having an alternative to Windows so Microsoft has less control over their (and the rest of PC gaming's) future.
While these moves are incredibly beneficial for Valve, I applaud them for doing it in a way that benefits the community as a whole and not just themselves.
Proton is the emulation layer created by Valve.
Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics API.
Your point might still stand, but it's worth debating. Without Proton, gaming on Linux is limited to native Linux games. With it, the story changes. Someone who likes PC gaming might be willing to turn Linux into their daily driver, game on Linux (with a mix of Proton and Vulkan), and now the market starts to support developers making more native Linux games, where they otherwise might not.
Currently, there are some games that use Vulkan to target both Windows and Linux. Proton encourages the developers to use the Microsoft technology stack instead. Apple has their own Metal, so Vulkan is dead in the water there anyway. Where does this leave Vulkan? Android? That is likely to move to WebGPU as I mentioned. GPGPU? That is totally dominated by CUDA and other vendor-specific APIs. Linux pro applications (Blender)?
That's surprising to me, but yes, if it's better than a native graphics API, it's probably better for everyone if developers stick to DirectX.
On the other hand, I don't think you addressed my point (with my assumption that games run better natively on Linux in Vulkan). If gamers are just going to skip Linux entirely without Proton, how is that better for Linux gaming, than if gamers migrate to Linux using Proton for an acceptable emulated experience, then there are more Linux gamers, and developing for Vulkan has some incentive it didn't have before.
Gaming on Linux was a thing before Proton and so far, it has not brought a giant jump in Linux users - e.g. Steam hwsurver still has Linux users hovering at about 1% [0]. Maybe that will change but so far this argument falls flat.
(25% of 0.8% is 0.2%! Ha!)
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/percentage-of-linux-gamers-on-ste...
My actual concern for proton/wine on linux is security related. The binary game space is a security nightmare, and enabling the windows side to run with very little compartmentalization is going to be a security disaster.
> Apple has their own Metal, so Vulkan is dead in the water there anyway.
How is Apple at all relevant in a thread about games? Apple has proactively shut out gaming in the past few years. Metal is almost exclusively used to draw fancy GUIs.
Furthermore, DXVK is an open source (strictly) project. Who honestly cares who came up with the API? People even run DXVK on Windows because it often offers superior performance.
There are some very big studios getting behind Vulkan: Embark, id.
As to the root comment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...
Meanwhile there are 188 with DirectX 12 support [1] and 2723 with DirectX 11 support [2].
Don't get me wrong, I too would like for the open cross-platform API to win, but so far support is far from extemely common.
[0] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Vulkan_games
[1] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DirectX_12_games
[2] https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DirectX_11_games
> As to the root comment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...
Could you expand on what you are trying to argue? It seems to me that Proton is the immediate reward while waiting for the platform to grow to get native ports would be the delayed reward. Yet "In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes" would support the caution against Proton if you were to generalize from children to platform strategies (not saying that you should).
With that said, as a game dev, Vulkan - along with DirectX and OpenGL - are second-class citizens already. The large bulk of gamedev is concerned with content, gameplay systems, and UI, with graphics being on the long tail of things that can make a title look truly unique and great, but the prevalence of Unity and Unreal make the actual rendering pipeline a thing of secondary - hugely important, but not primary - concern to most titles.
Not least of which: Making STEAM run perfectly in linux so that linux-native games have a seamless installation / management platform for linux-native machines.
Then of course steamdeck, which brings linux to those who would not otherwise try it and further incentivizing developers to target linux native.
Certainly the current market has not created those incentives, whereas a massive backcatalog w/ a (potentially) popular portable device may move that ball forward if it means there's a built in market for it going forward.
I think that's somewhat the point of what Steam is doing. Positioning themselves to exist without MS in the worst case while applying pressure that may curb MS's most user hostile or competition-limiting (in the app ecosystem) initiatives. Especially at a time of chip shortages and price premiums, users are more likely to hesitate buying a new computer just to have the latest win version when their existing hardware is still fine.
I think this is especially the case with gamers where and older CPU is much less likely to be a bottleneck in performance.
Obviously what you describe is a problem. If Valve is going to spend the money getting games working on Linux no one, trying to make money, would port their game. It will hurt. It will hurt groups that specialize in porting Linux games.
Without the installs, whatever we do today is unsustainable.
The presence of 15 year old script kiddies using aimbots does NOT IN ANY WAY justify having kernel level control over my machine, Linux or otherwise. Valve, and every other company that contributes to gaming in general, kindly stay the fuck out of our kernels.
EDIT: I feel a few folks in the comments are getting mixed up between the concepts of DRM and kernel-level anti-cheat drivers. DRM is what keeps folks from pirating software, as well as diminishing the freedom of where and how you can install the software. It sucks, but I understand why it exists, and that isn't what I'm talking about here
Kernel-level drivers, on the other hand, are drivers that run outside your sphere of influence (so-called user-space) and exist outside the checks and balances of your operating system that keep programs from doing whatever the hell they please.
Add on the fact that these programs are black boxes by design, and all of the sudden a company essentially has free reign to do whatever they want with your machine under your nose. This is dangerous and unacceptable.
The issue of course is that would reveal just how much of our data those things Hoover up.
That being said, I agree it would be harder to maintain an open source anticheat effectively.
The client can lie about being modified. E.g. it can send false hashes.
How much data a in-kernel or user-land anti-cheat can easily be detected by observing the traffic that flows out from your network, so it really doesn't matter if it's open source or not.
The biggest roadblock to a open source in-kernel anti-cheat is not "exposing the amount of data they extract from you", but rather it exposes how the anti-cheat is working, which is working against the efficiency of the anti-cheat. If you know how they detect you're cheating, it's much easier to overcome that hurdle.
In most cases, security-by-obscurity is obviously flawed, but when it comes to cheat/fraud detection, exposing how it happens makes it's core value less efficient.
The DRM anticheat drivers turn Linux PCs into a closed standard, closed OS platforms where your software kills itself (even if it's single-player) when you step out of the locked down platform.
You're trying to picture a difference where there is none.
This is why Linux users using Wine keep being banned from these platforms - they detect "unusual" runtime environment and ban the players because it doesn't fit into their narrow hash of an "acceptable" system.
It is an outright definition of sealing off your OS from modification.
Video games are a hobby for 99% of people out there, including myself. I can do without a plaything if it means not handing over the keys of the computer I built with my own hands to nefarious actors. That is FAR AND AWAY more important to me, and I'd hope most people.
Convince me that won't happen...
But you are correct in saying that it's a personal choice for everyone to make for themselves, based on how much they value fair play in their hobby of choice.
Particularly for anyone who puts hundreds (thousands?) of hours into getting good at their competitive multiplayer game of choice, the trade between installing an anti-cheat, suffering cheaters, or giving up on their hobby, is probably not the same math you're doing.
Fair criticism. I used Tencent as the example as they are one of the most prominent offenders. I don't trust any company to install these drivers, period, Chinese or otherwise.
> You lost me there to be honest, if you think the "true" purpose of anti-cheat drivers is for a foreign power to spy on us boring ordinary uninteresting people.
That's fine, but I definitely don't think keeping your "gaming experience" as hacker free as possible is the primary goal of these programs. I've worked in software too long to not know better.
What is it about games that makes you particularly worried about this? Why is that an industry that is more susceptible to this kind of "nefarious" activity as you put it?
Wouldn't it make more sense for business-related products to do this, since the odds of being on a computer that has actual useful information to steal would be much, much higher?
Why would a company invest in this kind of tech, in a highly visible field, full of people who will go over it with a fine-toothed comb (gamers are obsessive), for what seems like a very low-percentage hit rate on obtaining information?
Curious about your viewpoint on this..
Because it targets a younger, more ignorant user base that is much more likely than a company with security audits to blindly install. I certainly was at that age.
> Wouldn't it make more sense for business-related products to do this, since the odds of being on a computer that has actual useful information to steal would be much, much higher?
It does happen, but its less successful due to folks that work in operational security. If I suggested installing software with this type of driver at any job I've ever worked at with a security professional halfway worth their salt, I'd instantly be rejected.
> full of people who will go over it with a fine-toothed comb (gamers are obsessive)
Show me a gamer that has seen the code of one of these drivers. Name a single person. Those programs are black box by design.
You forgot to tell them it’s a state-of-the-art antivirus solution.
> Show me a gamer that has seen the code of one of these drivers.
They don’t want to see the code, they just want to know it works and allows them to play games with a much lower chance of playing against a cheater. The ban waves that end up on Reddit every year[0] are good enough for them.
0: https://reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/52mj1m/untrust...
Not necessarily. That gaming machine has good odds of being in a local network with other, more important and interesting machines. It can also scan local Wi-Fi area and scoop up even more information that can be used later.
Thought these were obvious.
> Why would a company invest in this kind of tech, in a highly visible field, full of people who will go over it with a fine-toothed comb (gamers are obsessive), for what seems like a very low-percentage hit rate on obtaining information?
1. They invest nothing out of the ordinary. They already have programmers on the payroll. Not like they spend 200 million on this alone. (Although there are companies like Google and Facebook who absolutely would and have invested much more than this just to be able to scoop up as much private info as possible -- not sure why this seems so unlikely to you, today, in 2022.)
2. The field is EVERYTHING BUT VISIBLE. Nobody has ever seen the source of these programs (outside of the authoring companies). Nobody. Ever.
3. Games are obsessive but most of them are technically illiterate. They install these things without a flicker of doubt.
4. The low-percentage is how it seems to you. Do it on a few hundred million machines and you are bound to find something very interesting in a good volume. It's statistics.
Tencent anticheat has a hard baked logger that prints out every network call it makes, which believe it or not was intended to create trust.
You can see in the disassembled code that it can’t make outbound calls without that function that prints the payload.
We can’t be open because it’s too risky. We can’t be closed because people think we’re scum.
Why not just make console games? This thread has me depressed.
Certainly was not my aim, and I sympathize. I've said many times I'd never move into game dev because of the workload and sheer work-to-flame ratio, and this thread isn't an exception. Likewise, thank you for providing some light from within the industry, it is appreciated.
I'd sign that NDA in a heartbeat if it didn't anonymize me, but I don't want my name floating around in databases I know nothing about. It's mighty tempting to see how the sausage is made, though.
I will ask this: Does the decision to include such an anti-cheat come from the studio usually, or the publisher?
Some studios might have some bean counter at the publisher asking about things they think are good ("You gotta have anti-cheat/DRM!")
Other studios might be coerced to "if you're going to use anti-cheat, why not use this one we have a good deal with".
But ultimately it has been a studio decision.
I'm even swapping my current anti-cheat due to this kind of Sinophobia.
Ironically, we had to specifically ask Tencent for their anti-cheat (because it was the best available..) but.. people thought it was spyware[0]. To the point that you literally see nothing else about my game it seems.
Double ironically: we still had cheaters on the platform[1]... it will probably be worse with EAC (as it was in the division days[2], some people even blamed the state of cheating on "not enough anti-cheat"[3])
But, to answer your question: in my experience it's the studio's choice, but some people in the publishing chain might try to coerce a decision.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BloodHunt/comments/pkpr1t/so_whats_...
[1]: https://futuregaming.io/gaming-news/bloodhunt-cheating-probl...
[2]: https://kotaku.com/race-to-clear-the-division-2s-new-raid-ma...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/4k17n8/confess...
And immediately land in a list of potential suspects the moment those cheats are broken by somebody else but not me? No, thanks. :( We live in a world where such an intellectual curiosity flags you as a criminal so I am never going to risk it.
If you want to demonstrate good will then maybe posting these files somewhere and making a "Show HN" thread is going to work better in showing the world that you're normal hardworking people?
> We can’t be open because it’s too risky. We can’t be closed because people think we’re scum.
I understand your position and I am not blaming you. But you are not the executive team of the company and you don't know their intentions and strategic plans.
People said the same thing about NSA spying, until the Snowden leaks.
You probably need to be reminded that before the Snowden revelations people who were saying the same as him were laughed at? Ridiculed?
Nothing stops this to be a part of a bigger scheme, you know? Sweep as many machines as you can with whatever means possible.
You over-fixate on gaming and are IMO missing a potential bigger picture. Plus China has proven that it is hostile to privacy many times, including a recent story here on HN where a laptop ordered from China came with preloaded spyware on a pretty deep / low level.
And even if you ignore all that, I still don't want a random rootkit to be able to take control of my machine any time somebody figures they'll flip a remote switch. Doesn't matter what their motivations are, at all, doesn't matter if we are "boring uninteresting people". They still have no business being able to control my machine THAT well remotely.
Second, this was already a solved problem since we could run our own servers and kick whoever we wanted. But this has largely been taken away, to the point that people don't know it ever existed.
It's not a binary thing. There will always be cheats. It's about raising the bar to be difficult enough for enough people to not bother. If you want an example of the effect cheating can have on games, look at Fall guys. It shipped as a unity game, was immediately reverse engineered and the game was effectively unplayable on PC [0]. They added easy anti cheat, and the problem effectively disappeared overnight.
> this was already a solved problem since we could run our own servers and kick whoever we wanted.
Banning someone from your server isn't solving the problem, it's pushing it onto another person. Abuse of these systems was rampant too, I have distinct memories of being kicked from battlefield and counter strike servers on the early 00's because I killed someone and they didn't like it. Having community run servers also has its one share of problems when combined with live service games. At best, you force community servers to keep up to date, or more than likely you end up with dozens of fragmented versions of games that are incompatible with each other, and if I want to play on server A with this group and server B with another, I need multiple copies of the game installed.
[0] https://www.gamerant.com/fall-guys-massive-cheater-problem/
It does not do that either. I've been on certain... interesting forums, shall we say (in Tor; and I don't remember the names, was a casual stroll through it and I made no effort to write down any place I checked on -- before you ask). Whoever wants a cheat eventually finds the best cheat authors who are quiet and are not drawing attention to themselves but have public Web 2.0 sites where they sell their software.
Nobody has defeated a certain class of cheats yet. They hook up to the kernel even before the anti-cheat system and it's game over from there.
Let's not pretend that all this is for the user's safety. It probably is intended like so but nowadays it feels like the companies are just digging their heels in and doubling down on a measure that doesn't stop the truly dedicated cheaters whose software is very affordable to buy to the casual 13 year old who wants to have the best K/D ratio in Battlefield in their school.
And everybody else loses, including the companies because if Valve wants to install a kernel rootkit on my Linux machine they'll lose my business there (and I suspect most Linux users because we are of a certain mindset). And all casual gamers HATE the series of "Install X?" and "Are you sure?" banners, too. Annoy them for long enough and they'll just shrug and move to XBox / PS / Switch. I've seen it happen a good amount of times already.
Everybody but all the non-cheating gamers that don't have to face cheaters in literally every single match. Where I think you and many others in this thread differ from folks like me is that you seem to expect a perfect solution whereas I will accept a solution that reduces the problem enough that it is barely noticeable. I don't care if "dedicated cheaters" will still cheat.
It clearly does. There's a world of difference between running tor/finding onion links, and googling "cheats for battlefield 2042". There are multiple stories out there of games destroyed by cheaters who add in Anti-cheat after the fact and the problem practically disappears. Note that doesn't mean no cheaters, but for games like Fall Guys (post linked above) it was practically every game was won by a cheater literally `noclip`'ing to the finish line.
> Whoever wants a cheat eventually finds the best cheat authors who are quiet and are not drawing attention to themselves but have public Web 2.0 sites where they sell their software.
While those cheats will continue to exist, most people aren't going to go to the trouble of installing Tor, finding an unlisted website and buying via bank transfer, they're going to google "Cheats for <Insert game name here>" and if the first link lets them spend $40 they will. _Those_ cheats are what utterly destroy games.
> And everybody else loses, including the companies because if Valve wants to install a kernel rootkit on my Linux machine they'll lose my business there
Honestly, the number of people who care enough to not install the kernel level anticheat is so small for modern games it doesn't really matter. I'd put $20 that there are cheaters out there that would install linux to avoid the kernel level anticheat than there are legit players who are ok with running closed source games, but not closed source kernel modules.
Then it is up for game developers to find a better solution to the problem, not for us to accept a violation of our privacy.
If you're playing against someone who's sniping you across the map every thirty seconds, it (usually) does not matter whether or not they're cheating or doing it legitimately. Both outcomes aren't fun for players, and both outcomes make the game less competitive. The idea that toxic behavior saps the fun out a game only when it's automated is just silly -- cheating doesn't really change anything about that dynamic.
Yes, this is admittedly more complicated than I'm making it sound, and yes, there is a valid conversation to be had about players wanting to feel that multiplayer games are fair, even when they mostly aren't. But while that player instinct around fairness does exist, it is also true that for a huge portion of your playerbase if someone is cheating convincingly enough that other players are still having fun then (outside of esports leagues) it often doesn't really matter. Let them, especially if they're convincing enough that players can't tell the difference. And if someone is purposefully creating a bad/toxic experience for other players, they should be either matched differently or banned anyway, even if they're just that good entirely out of their own skill. Good players who legitimately win can still be toxic and annoying to play against.
This isn't a universal hard rule, but in general you should optimize for the outcomes you want, not for the way that people get there. It is better to have a game with cheaters/bots where people are still constantly playing at the edge of their skill level, where there are consequences for griefing, and where players are trying to create competitive/fun matches, than a game where all of your energy is devoted to just figuring out whether or not a match was miserable for "legitimate" reasons.
And for a lot of games, probably >90% of your playerbase is in this group where they care more about competitive, interesting matches that help them grow as a player and get better at the game than they care about the extreme low-level integrity of the game. Most of your playerbase is frankly not good enough or competitive enough at your game at the global levels where it matters whether or not everybody on the global ladder deserves their win count. So why are we collectively optimizing everything around such a small percentage of players?
There will always be trade-offs in freedom when you try to implement rules to improve the freedom of those that want to play on a balanced playing field.
This is true in society as well.
Kernel level drivers are a whole different can o' worms. A corporation could make my gaming rig into part of what amounts to a spyware botnet with me being none the wiser other than encrypted traffic coming OUT of my machine. Those drivers by design are black boxes, and there is no way to monitor what your machine is actually doing. That shit shouldn't be on mine or anyone else's system, especially under the premise of a "fair gameplay environment".
For the average user they can do that with basic permissions anyway. I wouldn't notice a steady stream of 2-300 kbps of binary data uploading from my machine, for example. I'd chalk it down to shitty programming.
On any windows or Linux system, there is nothing stopping a binary from sniffing your clipboard, reading your .ssh directory, or just deleting your home folder/filling the files with garbage.
Think of it a bit like doping tests in sports. As long as you're just competing in amateur races for fun then take all the steroids you want. Once you want to start competing in serious races be prepared for people demanding blood and urine samples.
So while anti-cheat helps protect the pro/serious players (who in some ways are community/marketing leaders in this world of Twitch and YouTube), it also creates a fair environment for all the casual and aspiring players who keep spending money on the game in droves.
Pro cheating uses hardware to cheat. It streams the video output and keyboard/mouse input to an AI/ML. Making these kernel anti-cheat useless there.
Casual players looking to spend money on cosmetics aren't affected by cheaters because the system influencing the players to buy isn't affected by the cheaters. The way most of these "influence systems" work is by using marketing strategies. It'll augment your match, or otherwise the players you meet, to see cosmetics you don't have. Coupled with gambling mechanics to induce addiction and sheer marketing material ("best offer now!") makes for this whole pro-kernel-anti-cheat industry move highly dubious.
Source: i worked at a company that writes such systems. The day I decided to quit was when my naive ass heard the team lead, on a recruitment call, explain to a candidate what we do: "we refine a company's ability to get kids addicted".
It's a completely different game (no pun intended) than what news outlets want us to think.
This is a rather confused thing to say. Are there players out there that just grind cosmetics and don't care about win rate, game quality, or wasted time? Probably a handful.
But the overwhelming majority of players in a game are there to have fun and cheaters utterly destroy that. Cheaters, smurfs, etc, are a plague on online multiplayer gaming where one troll ruins everything for everyone else match.
At the end of the day it's just a game, and if the game disappears or whatever humanity will go on. So let's not lose perspective. But saying casual players aren't affected by cheaters is flat out wrong.
I worked in gaming as well, so I'm familiar with the issues you're referencing, but hyperbolic exaggerations don't help us address it.
Let me put it this way - I'd much rather play an online shooter with a hardcore kernel level anticheat than a one without it.
And yes, community moderation is great, except that it has mostly gone away in most games.
a) can't allow "vote to kick" from the opposing team in a competitive environment. That has obvious abuse written all over it, either intentionally or unintentionally (opposing team is losing or opposing player is legit good but they think he is cheating) b) when you allow vote kicking of "same team only", like CSGO, there is a lot of grief type of harassing where parties of players (like a 3 queue) can vote kick teammates just for general griefing reasons, intentionally deranking, and the like.
Kernel level anti-cheat is meaningless.
There are also videos on Youtube demonstrating it in actions
But there is plenty when you google the key words.
Check what a top player can do: https://youtu.be/8Qf5Xlty1Cg I doubt an AI will be anywhere close in the next 10 years.
That's where anticheat is going imo: algorithmiclly defining what the fastest more precise human should be capable of. Anything beyond that is "cheating".
Skill tunable AI, developed by a private poorly funded group, that plays the game for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=revk5r5vqxA
AlphaStar, developed by a large corp, mopping the floor with Battle.Net's Starcraft 2 players https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1zhmGPmAAM
OpenAI, developed by a large corp, beats top DotA2 team https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfb6aEUMC04
On one hand, it's exciting tech [old] news. On the other, people who play competitive games must hope for a solution against abuse. The rest of us must hope it isn't an invasive solution such as, what effectively is, kernel malware.
AlphaStar and OpenAI have nothing to do with the conversation here, right off the bat.
This video is so cringey too with random burps and "skynet" references. The external hosting is not related at all to the "soft" cheating, and that in turn has nothing to do with AI. Packet sniffing vs OpenCV vs Tensorflow for finding a head is not a meaningful difference.
Years ago, and I mean years ago cheat developers were building this type of "soft aim" cheats that don't snap.
And the separate input via controller _is_ detectable if this becomes enough of an issue... your "AI" is generating input and it often will generate input that controllers wouldn't. Because the "AI" is ML and only being applied to finding on screen targets.
-
Making a second model to generate realistic input would be a whole other achievement no one has even bothered with because... they don't need to.
On-host hacking is rampant and these games can't seem to stop it, so no one has bothered.
I'd be for kernel-level anti-cheat if it actually worked, but script kiddies are beating this "kernel level anti-cheat" handily.
To me the answer is boring simple statistical analysis, increasing the cost of recovering from bans, etc...
But that doesn't sound as sexy so I guess we can keep this farce of a cat and mouse game going.
Cheat behavior is obvious. Ridiculous long distance accuracy. Weird movement. Weird map awareness. Weird awareness of other players. Etc.
I guess your last encounter with aimbots was in the early 00s…
Cheaters quit after a while because the game loses its challenge, and people being cheated leave because the game.feela unfair, and eventually there's not much of a community left.
Besides, it's not just a matter of improving accuracy. Elite players are elite in multiple facets of the game. Movement, general awareness, map awareness, accuracy, etc. Many of these metrics are easy to measure.
Cheaters will show up as outliers and it is at that point that their accounts should be manually reviewed.
With casual gaming I really don't even care if someone is "cheating" to improve so long as I feel the game was fair. I can put a red dot on my screen to improve my aim, as an example.
This was impossible in Q3A (1998) without introducing an input lag thanks to client side prediction. Server also didn't send you updates on other clients that are too far away, behind a hill - you'd pretty much only receive positions of those you could see, hear or that could see you. In Warzone, you can see everyone on the map with a wallhack.
I really wonder why the game is designed this way. I guess it might be to limit required computation power of the servers? They still do stuff like hit detection, so server surely has some idea of the physics.
On top of all that, this stuff is possible even today, months or even years after such exploits being widely known. They do have a kernel-level AC driver, but they don't even seem to detect trivial hacks from the server-side.
Behavioural anti-cheats are not the answer. Implementations are crap and under-developed, and I don’t blame them: you would need tremendous (server-sided) power to correctly process the models considering how complex multiplayer games are, and it just isn’t worth the investment and complexity to them.
It’s just cheaper to pay rootkit developers (like EAC or BattlEye) and knowingly infect client devices. Hell, their drivers are even WHQL signed by Microsoft. And when false positives hit? Just blame the anti-cheat vendor. Potential HR problem dodged.
[1] https://www.i3d.net/products/hosting/anti-cheat-software/
Robocalypse Now: Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiP0zKF9bc
Why use deep learning when so, so many bots (and their host accounts) could be blocked with trivial heuristics? My only guess is allowing spinbots/farming somehow provides a financial gain in CSGO?
Valve devs have a lot more leeway than your average developer. They honestly might have just thought it would be cooler.
Beyond that they now have the infrastructure to detect more subtle forms of cheating through deep learning using Overwatch (the reporting system, not the game) as ground truth data to train their AI.
If you play with lower ranked friends and do really good in matches you will get reported a lot which will tank your trust factor and almost guarantees it that will only see hackers from them on.
They say they use other factors like account metadata, but I have a 10 year old account, with purchased games and verified phone and still got "Low Trust Factor" after playing with friends and started to have an obvious hacker every other match.
That is why I am a former CSGO player
The average cheater is paying $10-50 for cheat software. You may not like the anti-cheat software, but it works against the most common cheats.
I think they could have an opt-out league that doesn’t require anti-cheat but remains separate. You might be one of the few non-cheaters in there, but at least it would be an option.
They're buying trained models from people who have the fancy hardware.
Heuristic software works against the most common cheats. Standard anti-piracy tricks work against the most common cheats. Kernel-level anticheat is only useful against a very specific kind of high-end cheat, and if you're going that far, you might as well use an undefeatable hardware cheat.
Meanwhile we are letting shady companies illegally spy on users [0] and mine crypto [1], for what? What is the gain? What is the value proposition of kernel-level drivers in the anti-cheat application? What's more, the average gamer doesn't know anything about computers. How can they be expected to make an informed decision about whether or not they should buy a game with kernel-level anticheat if they don't know what that means? Even worse, there is no legal requirement that a game's marketing material say anything about its anti-cheat implementation. These aren't tin-foil hat concerns, these are the enablers of real scandals that have happened and are happening.
0. https://www.wired.com/story/kernel-anti-cheat-online-gaming-...
My observation is that competitive online gaming is over. It's just a cesspool of cheaters now.
Sounds like it works, then.
“Yes.”
“What did it cost?”
Some cheat dev only needs to develop that "high-end software cheat" once and can sell it millions of times around the world, with super easy distribution over the internet. A setup with hardware video capture costs $50-$200 for every single user for hardware alone, and needs at least a bit of computer knowledge to set up.
Emphatically, it does not. Writing exploits and mitigating them is an arms race, and it is always easier to exploit than it is to defend. The entire reason for such software being sold is after all that it works, even when it is the bad/easy fundamentally detectable kind that runs inside the same OS as the game.
Anti-Cheat on the Account-Level is meaningless. You ban a cheater? Who cares. He will back with a new Account some Minutes later. Hardware Bans are useless aswell, as they can easily be spoofed. The only effective strategy for Anti-Cheat is a Universal Identity Provider, which can proof you are a real Human with no Cheat Record.
Isn't that what you are talking about here?
You can create a new Steam account, sure, but that would start you again from scratch as a total newbie (and losing access to anything you'd bought)
I've wondered if there's some sort of economy here, i.e. someone with a ton of stolen accounts monetizing them by offering to cheat all day on your competitor's server.
Most of these accounts have security questions set, so you can't change the email and truly "take ownership" of the account, but it's good enough for cheating on servers.
Some shops even have an API for generating accounts or tokens, so your hack client can have a feature where you get a new account right from your game. Get banned, reconnect in a few seconds.
If kernel level anti-cheat lead to "serious cheats" having to resort to the above, then kernel level anti-cheat is actually pretty fucking effective.
This may be true for a class of cheats, but it isn't broadly true. That means these category of cheats can only enhance what is already visible.
In FPS games, being able to see players position through walls is a super valuable cheat _and_ requires access to the underlying game engine (to extract player location).
Maybe because doing the math to figure out if it should be visible is handled completely on the frontend to keep latency low?
This is the equivalent of a bank API giving you everyone's information, and the frontend SPA filtering it to only the logged in user.
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
You see no cheap aimbots and conclude the anti-cheat is not relevant anymore. May be the right conclusion is that they're working.
Not saying this justifies the kernel drivers. I don't trust my gaming computer precisely for this reason. I wonder if some form of containerization/virtual machine could make it possible to both allow for this kind of kernel-level anti-cheat without exposing my whole system to untrusted code.
No. Because then you could write an aim-bot that runs in the host machine…
Personally, I'm completely fed up with online competitive multiplayer for other reasons so it doesn't really affect me. I just don't by the games that would use kernel-level anti-cheat to begin with.
I don't disagree with your general take, but you can't accuse Valve Anti Cheat of being a failure.[0]
The benefits of this sort of income may be high compared to the benefit of being a "serious competitive game".
I think Minecraft servers are instructive, because they're often run just as cynically as free to play games, but with less competence, so it's easier to see what's going on. You do see a lot of pay-to-unban there, for instance.
I wonder if we'll eventually end up at a point where all competitive gaming is run entirely sever side and IO is streamed to cryptographically signed and verified hardware.
The worst thing gaming has ever done was think it was anything like professional sports. I think that I'm in favor of cheating in games just because it rankles people who take gaming way too seriously.
Sure the technological barrier is important, but I fail to see how they're categorically different depending on what they require of the participants.
I don't have an issue saying they both should not be taken seriously, or that both should be taken seriously, but to draw a line between them in terms of "seriousness" I think needs elaborating to me.
Also stupid. Athlete worship is as bad or worse than celebrity worship. The obsession with and tribalism from professional sports has creates some of the most obnoxious bores in the world. All for a bunch of people kicking or throwing a ball around.
Every activity has its own popularity, and number of fans of various seriousness... Cat and dog shows, caber toss, curling, singing competitions, on and on and on, the list is about infinite, since it encompasses everything within which someone could potentially be more skilled.
Singling out video games among all the other things humans do competitively feels like a personal bias.
I personally don't care about probably 99% of the 'competitions' out there, but I don't give anyone crap for being obsessed about their own thing.
(I don't play games online multiplayer style, so I'm not in the target group anyway.)
I don't think there's such a thing as "gaming", as you use the word... everyone involved does their own thing, in infinite variety as well.
No, the other way around. On "pro" servers there is moderation that makes cheating a non-issue. It's in the casual space that cheaters ruin everything, because there isn't any human moderation.
I'd phrase it as "you can still play the game, just not against other humans".
I often care about online multiplayer, but only with my friends (who I trust not to cheat). I don't want to install a rootkit for that.
That or giving up the problem.
Unless you run flatpak, nix, lxc containers, or some other process isolation scheme, all programs on eg. A debian desktop have this sort of free reign. It’s not uncommon for accidents to happen that take out chunks of a system[0].
0: https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issue...
Well yes, sandboxing should be the goal! Installing Steam from Flathub is a good first step on desktop machines. But as long as games require anti-cheat software at the kernel level, I'll keep a Windows partition around to sandbox the gaming world as a whole.
This is the case for user level anticheats too. 99% of what a malware wants to do it can do from userspace.
I don't play a lot of FPS, but In Dota2 I see a bunch of hackers where the replay literally shows you how they do not even react with their mouse to a threat that appears suddenly but still manage to cast a spell somehow. I don't even think that machine learning is needed to detect that kind of hack.
In case you're curious, it's a horse thing: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-free-rei...
Almost ALL exhibit rootkit behaviour. Capture all OS events, dig through system and user directories, list all processes, fetch DNS and browser histories, block certain system calls, and more just to name a few. But hey! Their software (including drivers) are signed by Microsoft, so that’s alright :))
Funny part is that all those drivers are created by no other than ex-community members, under no advisory from system specialists or security experts. So guess what? Security vulnerabilities all around. Pretty much all their drivers are wide open and unsecure.
Nice fun having persistent, kernel-level, system-trusted exploits auto-installed on your system!
Oh, almost forgot, BattlEye has the ability to download custom bytecode from their servers and execute it. RCE baked right in. Good stuff.
So your frustration is more than reasonable..
EDIT: I will try to find the posts pointing to all vulns that I mentioned, and cite them.
We need a real solution to this honestly, it’s not enough to just kick up a fuss about game devs including anti-cheat and ever-more-invasive anti-cheat, but actually providing solutions people can use.
The economic incentives do not exist on consoles to cheat, so publishers are convinced that control of the platform is the problem.
On release they made a big deal about how small the kernel level portion is and how most of the complexity of the anti-cheat was still in user space. I'd be interested to hear how true that is and if that makes much of a difference in your mind how trustworthy it is.
Generally speaking though; the size of the components that run in the kernel is not important. The kernel mode software can act as a window to the rest of the system.
Downside to all of this is it would have to take longer to get into matches to keep players in their pools. I know games already do this, but they seem to match players up or down too quickly to keep the velocity of matches going.
As I type this I realize this system wouldn't work. Pro players would complain about long waits whiles average players would play the most frequently. Lose pros and you lose average players.
As far as I understand, it is coming via Proton/Wine, so these programs would need some kind of kernel level access as well (if they don't have it currently)? Or maybe they're just emulating Windows kernel calls or something like that. I mean, less intrusive (but also less effective) in a Linux system.
Let me say that I have been working in AAA online game development for more than 7 years now;
I have worked on games that had 10's of millions of players, and these were full fat $60 AAA games.
Cheating was the second[0] biggest issue of our games, it sucked the entire enjoyment out- getting ganked by a bunch of players shooting through walls is not fun.
Why did we "allow" cheating?: Well, we never did, we used some of the best anti-cheat software we could afford, but it was still possible to cheat.
"Don't trust the client" is a common response, but being fully synchronised to the server has drawbacks too; servers typically "tick" at about 10-20fps, theres a lot of tricks we pull off to make it seem as if it's going the 144-240Hz of your monitor, like showing hitmarkers (but not damage numbers) to make it feel as if it's fast, if your movements were synced to the server you would feel as though you were walking through water, as the movement would be very slow as it needs to do a 150ms round trip to sync a step.
The truth of it is if we fully synchronised every action to the server: not only would it feel abhorrently slow; it would require a full 3d rendered simulation of the game world, we'd be able to run maybe 3-4 users on 40 core machines with 256G of ram... that's not feasible.
"Don't make online games" is another common response to hearing the realities and difficulties of making these kinds of games.
But I'd suggest, if that's your response; even if we made them that doesn't mean you have to install them.
We're both making a decision here: We decided to make an online game because it can be a lot of fun, you decided to install an online game because it can be a lot of fun.
Cheaters want to ruin that fun, we have woefully few tools to prevent that.
(by the by: I'm not in favour of kernel level anti-cheat, but fuck are cheaters the bane of my existence).
[0]: Biggest issue was actually bugs, but when we fixed bugs, cheaters were the next primary complaint.
Here's a good perspective on the situation by someone who was cheating: https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/4k17n8/confess...
However, there is nothing there that should be hard to pick up by modelling normal behavior, and then being able to flag the anomalies. Most things he manipulated were known server side. Going the route of installing rootkits seems like fools errand to me, of which I can understand a possible non-nefarious intention behind... but it starts stinking to high water unless the other more obvious approaches are not seriously exhausted.
Develop mathematical models for likelihoods of cheating based on user input, and non-conforming game states. Create a heuristic that takes into account time spent and the possible cost of losing progress. Move possible cheaters into isolated environments where they go up against each-other. Or subtly punish by reducing drop rates.
In the post you linked to, he mentioned things like. 125-500% move speed. 200-2500% DMG increases, by manipulating client side states. However, surely, this is trivial to detect server side?
The hardest things I can imagine detecting are probably stochastic cheats like randomly improving your aim and reaction time, but these arguably less severe, to a point where if it becomes super-human, it again becomes detectable. And, these are also the kind of cheats that typically can be done through user input, and thus very easy to make undetectable to any root-kit like anti cheat.
For lest than the cost of one AAA game, you can buy the hardware required to do this processing completely outside of any rootkit. If cheating is your thing, and based on the post in question, the cheater could make back this investment in 15 minutes... arguably.
----
But, to sort reply to your answer to my question. I'm curious, do you have some more details other than "yes"? The post you linked, to me, read as "nope, The Division does not do that this at all. And if they did, very few things this person did would have been possible".
Of course, I don't expect AAAs to offer an experience like this, because human moderation doesn't scale cheaply to 10s of millions of players.. race to the bottom <3
I think it does scale, but it requires users being able to host their own servers for your game. It doesn't scale in a way that maximizes control for the IP holder, however.
Cheaters also do things like buy CD codes/stolen accounts which are sold cheaply on various websites.
It also doesn’t help when there are promotional campaigns that let people play the game for free or very cheaply.
We even had a problem with people buying the game with stolen credit cards.
Regardless of that, human moderation efforts are a full time job, personally I’d be happy to release the server, but the server requires 40 cores and 256G of ram to boot, many people don’t have that, and that’s not including the kinds of nefarious things people did with the binaries of other games gameservers we gave out (like saving garbage back to our persistence, or trying to inject statistics to the leaderboards systems if there are any.)
It sounds easy from the outside; if you think it’s easy I really do have a job for you. Maybe I’m stupid.
But I was not told (for business reasons anyway) to hold on to the game server binaries.
We did it because making the game was easier/possible that way and the gameserver itself is nearly impossible to load for most people anyway.
I promise you that it is not cheap to host gameservers — if we could we would have pushed that burden onto players. (Speaking purely economically)
So you didn't check the demo corresponding to the reporter's account and timestamp? Why not? Why don't you have IDs in logs?
My experience comes from 100% free games. Codes and accounts were irrelevant. If you can't earn some reputation and trust on a public server, you can't get invited to a private one. Simple as that. It doesn't matter if wannabe-cheaters can make a million accounts.
> Regardless of that, human moderation efforts are a full time job
For many clans and gaming communities, moderating their turf is a passion project and having the keys is a sought-after position of privilege. They love to spectate and look out for potential new "hires" while keeping the chat clean and kicking out any griefers and cheaters.
> personally I’d be happy to release the server, but the server requires 40 cores and 256G of ram to boot
> the gameserver itself is nearly impossible to load for most people anyway.
I think you lack some imagination. Letting gamers operate their own servers doesn't mean they have to host their own servers. Just like discord "servers" aren't actually hosted by their "owners".
> It sounds easy from the outside; if you think it’s easy I really do have a job for you.
Sorry, not interested in AAA games.
> Maybe I’m stupid.
You're probably not stupid but it's all too common to see people not being able to think outside the box.
Logs are great, but people are not great at reporting cheaters. Some resort to recording their screen or cheaters bypass the “report” button by acting in a way that prevents that button from popping up.
We must have lost thousands of man hours on people falsely hitting the report button when someone was being better than them. Everything in it’s time.
Community moderation is a very comforting idea, but the reality is actually not conducive to a good online experience except for a very small minority; the kinds of problems that crop up are obviously exclusion but also go into the area of power abusing operators.
I know you’re going to say “go to another server” but honestly, that’s naive. Oper abuse is even more deeply unpleasant than cheating. It is enough to put you off a game entirely.
So the gatekeeping, politics aspect are obviously not good but what is also true is that there is a large contingent of people who desire good matchmaking, good matchmaking depends heavily on:
A) regionality
B) a large population to pull from
C) consistency of the platform and administration.
If you get into a “random” game and someone cheats, that’s no different than if you joined a “random” game and the admin of the server did something within their power.
Having a small population for a game like apex legends means that the outcome is nearly always the same.
Having low regionality of hosted servers means people in South America have extremely bad experiences; as severs there are expensive and finding a population to fund it amongst themselves is difficult.
Also, obviously, a 40 core 256G windows PC costs in the region of €300/mo (not including the windows server license). Given people are already very cost conscious when it comes to games; getting people to shell out the price of a game each every month to run a server seems unlikely.
I'm sharing my experience. I can say that I had very good experience with community moderation for many many years across numerous different games.
By the sound of it, you haven't even tried it, you're just explaining why you don't believe it works?
And the end result then is that you have no moderation. Cheaters can still cheat, griefers can still grief, and hosting your game for a better experience is impossible. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that puts me off a game entirely.
This patterns of thinking "Well I'll just download a binary onto my clients machine and force it into compliance, then I can throw all of them into a big pot and they'll all mix just fine!" Is a kind of persistent insanity that is leading to your woes, more than it is the lack of a stiffer boot to land on the necks of client machines.
"If we just control the platform"
"If we just control the hardware"
"If we just control the software"
"If we just control everything".
"And what of tools to moderate bad actors?"
"Eh? Sure, here's a kick function."I’m not saying it’s impossible to cheat on consoles but it wasn’t a problem for us (lag switching aside; which was actually easy to detect).
Things like stadia help the platform more than consumers think; but people resoundedly rejected Stadia for a myriad of reasons.
I think everyone here paints a rosy picture of what content moderation is, and maybe we stretched our hand a bit thin regarding having enough humans involved (despite games taking 700-1400 people 4+ years to make in the first place)- but the rub is that people can’t have everything.
We can’t expect you not to try to tamper with the binaries and ruin games for others.
You can’t expect us not to try preventing it.
Because at the end of the day; people do submit reimbursement claims because of cheaters ruining their experience, and if there’s one thing that I can promise it’s that no amount of human review will ever be sufficient, we already put 70 or so humans on reviewing reports, and even then it was difficult to punish people, because if you ban someone they just buy another key from a Russian third market reseller for €3 (or if you make the game free god help you)
I'm saying that players often have the barest bones of ways, if they have anything at all, to say who they would and who they would not like to play with.
Players refunding over cheating are also refunding because, when they discover cheating, they can do absolutely nothing about it. If they're lucky, they might get to scream into the void and hope a moderator listens. Some brand new player on a $3 key just waltzed into the pool of players and everyone has to trust them as equally as everyone else. This is not how trust works.
But then how should one do it? I don't know! Precious little work has been done here. And why? Because it's been wasted on pretending that one can trust the clients machine if we just download enough malware to it.
What’s the issue here, really? Who’s being affected by a game they don’t play and don’t want to play?
Yes, and that's the decision you have available to you. I would make the same decision, but I still think the developers are smart to put those kernel level anti-cheat schemes in their games. I don't do much multiplayer gaming anyway, but when I have, rampant cheating entirely ruins the experience.
They even backpedaled when people found out that they were analyzing your DNS cache on Windows to search for known cheat provider websites.[0]
[0]. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_an...
Since then, they've focused on other avenues to combat cheating (e.g. Overwatch, a replay reviewing system involving the community, or VACnet, a ML model that they trained to recognize in-game behaviours linked to cheating).
I would make an exception if someone managed to get Linus Torvalds to sign off their kernel code. Nobody ever bothered and there were always awkward but predictable silent pauses from vendors.
Oh and add to this all of the servers handled the most sensitive data to ever touch the internet. Vendors would sometimes entertain the idea of their code getting 3rd party code and security reviews but it never got past the idea stage.
In other words, follow the money. No one is watching someone else play Super Tux Kart on Twitch. (lol) They're watching someone play the latest AAA game, where the financial incentives to cheat are the highest.
I agree that we should take a stance and I don't like kernel-level drivers any more than you do.
Kernel-level drivers are required on Windows. However, we even know if this is also going to be required on Linux?
Generally speaking, I was also livid when I learned about how Riot planned to solve cheating in Valorant with it's own rootkit - and I think Microsoft isn't crazy about the idea either. My two cents are on this being one of the major reasons MS decided to make TPM mandatory for Windows 11.
Especially given the poor record of video game companies to take security seriously [0]. Even Rockstar's cash cow game [1], there was the lowest of low hanging performance fruit available that was not addressed by any ongoing effort. Why should I believe that any game company rushing to push some release out the door is going to take their kernel patch seriously? Security is hard and Intel/AMD/professional kernel devs screw it up all the time.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjwd8n/hacker-drops-steam-ze...
[1] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Edit: fixed the formatting
Even with a somewhat unusual system, and running wayland, the experience is fantastic. (NOTE: I also don't tend to buy triple A games on my computer, so that could obviously be an issue).
At least give users the option to pick either 32bit or 64bit client. I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that. And people who want 32bit games pick the 32bit client.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/179#...
"Please provide a 64-bit Steam package, so that those of us on 64-bit distros don't have to install a gazillion 32-bit packages."
Seemed to do the job fine, ymmv.
Really? There are still many x86-only games on Steam, tons of which probably won't ever be updated. And if Valve does not make that clear on the Store pages then they will receive part of the blame and support burden.
I think what is more likely to happen is for Steam to come with it's own 32-bit dependencies that marshal to the 64-bit system GL/Vulkan/etc. The client itself might be ported to 64-bit too but that would not even be needed at that point.
This is already partially the case today - the Steam runtime contains most required 32-bit (and 64-bit) libraries and Steam is already (optionally) using containers for games: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/t...
Presentation on this from 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrbWbBYAolo
In fact, I'm mostly on MacOS M1, and there is only a 64bit client on that. Sure, the game collection is small, but I'm fine with that.
The biggest issue I can can see with the Steam Deck, or more specifically, Linux on the Steam Deck, is Microsoft's Game Pass. It simply will not work on Linux, and at the moment, I spend more time playing game via Game Pass than I do via Steam. Microsoft have a very clear direction with their recent purchases of publishers and studios, and I worry that the lack of any sort of Game Pass support (without installing Windows) will hamper the Steam Deck.
Of course, Valve are probably hoping that the Steam Deck will discourage Game Pass subscriptions since it eats into their market, but as long as Microsoft are also willing to sell games on Steam, I think having both options is the healthiest for PC gaming overall.
I game on Windows, work on Mac. Used fedora daily through uni and before.
I use Fedora Silverblue on two laptops right now. The experience is hardly what I would call "good"[0] and yet it's still the most reasonable I've had with Linux in a long time.
[0] GNOME sucks, Kinoite has a lot of issues so kinda stuck with GNOME. rpm-ostree can't handle groups and fails when given large numbers of packages to install. Restricted codecs and ffmpeg need to be installed using rpm-ostree. Stuff like that.
Why do some people think this is a point in Linux Desktop's favor? Anyone who just needs a web browser could use ChromeOS. Those of us who use a desktop for other things have legitimate criticisms and this is an unfair (and lazy) dismissal.
There's no comparison if you value your time and mental state.
Except for 4.0.
Going to have to disagree with you there. The linux desktop experience is now superior to the windows desktop experience.
A relatively small number of people are buying the steam deck to use Linux, most are buying it to play games on.
In any way, it's a good think that you can install Windows on it. Finally being able to buy fancy bespoke hardware that isn't dependent on some cloudshit makes me happy.
So I wouldn't make such bold claims.
But other than that I am completely on board with what the author is saying. I come from the same background. Until just a couple years ago I had a Windows PC solely for gaming. Now I can't remember when I last booted Windows on it.
Another weird side effect of this gaming revolution on Linux is that I prefer X11 over Wayland.
When Wayland became the default in Fedora I was on board, thinking it was the new cool thing. But gradually I realized that it's really not ready for the big time. I still need X11 to share my desktop on MS Teams (thanks Microsoft for that btw), and I still need it for most games.
It's an inside joke across a much larger chunk of the PC gaming zeitgeist than your friend group! And it's what the author was referencing.
But he didn't really make a claim, he said "hopefully"
How much progress it has made, is astonishing
Also regarding Wayland, yeah, same. Then again, Wayland is pretty young, so I would say, give it 2-3 more years? Until then, X11. And there is many cute WMs on X11, but not wayland, soooo... I am stuck myself in X11 :D Alongside that, there is Pipewire. Yeah, right... Its quite impressive. It also fixed all my.. quirks/issues I had with Linux audio
Anyway, every year feels better, and I am happy with that.
Which GPU do you have? I can run most games on Wayland on AMD (including the likes of Cyberpunk).
I still boot up Windows sometimes due to the lack of HDR support.
They do have money. They made tons from Half-Life etc. Then they now have a huge continual income stream from Steam.
Heck, Microsoft followed exactly the same trajectory some years earlier, to the extent that their operating system is still synonymous with the idea of a desktop PC outside of the US (which I understand leans heavily towards the Mac, somehow). Their position is showing signs of crumbling only after multiple years of neglect and outright self-damage to their OS. The stability of a monopolist position locked in early is sometimes greatly understated.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Valve generates multiple billions+ in revenue annually.
While not technically "a console" it's still one of the best line-up ever for a new hardware launch, and it's probably going to be in thousands later this month.
But no, 2022 will also not be the year of the Linux desktop. I compare Wine with ductape. It works but don't ask how. It's fine for casual gamers, but these are few.
The year of the Linux desktop will only come when all the developers treat Linux as a native compilation target. When Linux has all the drivers. As long as games get "emulated" on Windows in Linux, people will always choose Windows.
If you can make every game available on Linux via wine/proton then you would have to assume that every one of the Windows holdouts (Ok, most. Some people always find excuses) will swap to Linux as their primary machine, you can then, with reasonable confidence say "Linux has X marketshare" and then make a decision on whether that is worth your development time.
I just don't think that marketshare is going to be anywhere near what it would require to become a default target and I say that as a die hard linux user.
This is from personal experience because I was very excited about SteamCMD. But after trying to run some dedicated servers (for some sim-racing titles), I still got win32 binaries and had to run them thru Wine. Switched back to Windows because the performance was noticeable worse.
Again, it's fine for casuals but for the average PC gamer a big no no.
The problem isn't even market share, it's that Linux Desktop doesn't constitute a targetable platform because it is so fragmented and unstable. This is why Steam has to pack in its own runtime libraries just so native Linux games have some kind of known base system.
> Ok, most. Some people always find excuses
Excuses? Like there's some kind of moral imperative to use Linux? People have reasons they prefer to use other environments. I've used Linux Desktops on and off for 20 years and I've watched statements like this consistently turn away interested users through this kind of dismissive bullshit.
> Excuses? Like there's some kind of moral imperative to use Linux?
That's not what I meant at all, apologies if I was unclear.
I meant of the people (gamers specifically in this context) who say things like "Oh I would use linux but X" and then X gets solved so it's now Y that is the blocker for them moving to linux. These are the excuse finders I was talking about. They speak a big game about wanting to switch but always find one more thing preventing it from happening. They are of course a small minority.
Also I didn't mean to imply that everyone wants or needs to move to linux, more that there are already a number of people wanting to move but they are waiting for X to happen before they can/will move and that wine/proton has been great for helping some of them to make the switch.
> I've used Linux Desktops on and off for 20 years and I've watched people like you consistently turn away interested users through this kind of dismissive bullshit.
I'm not sure where this is coming from or how I'm turning away interested users but that was not my intention.
This is the correct way to deploy most software on Linux. Everything outside of glibc and openssl should be part of a standardized runtime. Look at what flatpak is doing.
Yet if I say I'll only support Proton on Linux I am inviting myself to constant hate mail
I'm not sure what Stadia includes in their base system but if they have any interest in long-terms maintenance then I'd expect that the base system is minimal and everything else is bundled with the game - even if provided by an SDK.
(*) Audio subststem devs' insistence on reinventing APIs is disappointing, but just use SDL or OpenAL Soft or whatever to abstract it for you or tell your users to use the available compatibility tools.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...
Also, any decently complex commercial game has a long ongoing list of bugs. If you feel overwhelmed by an obscure bug from one user, you probably just need better issue tracking.
> Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not.
> Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!
> Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux.
There were a handful of problems that were specific to the player's Linux setup, but that happens for all platforms. Many Windows crash reports are only resolved by "problem must be on your end, please reinstall GPU drivers, turn off weird settings in your driver, do not force gsync on" etc.
I did get some "I won't be buying then", which is fair.
I do have to second the sentiment from other comments about excellent bug reports from Linux players. They usually auto-include logs, specs and sometimes even repro steps in their first bug report. Other players rarely do so.
* Proton is a very useful tool, but it is and will always be chasing a moving target. Any game update can break Proton compat and Wine/Proton is complex enough that updates do sometimes regress support for some games. Do I really want to invest (time wise and emotionally) in games that could just stop working?
* I want my platform to be officially supported. That does not mean that every niche issue needs to be fixed but I should at least be entitled to a refund if I cannot get the game to work or if it stops working due to game updates - without any limitations.
* I also care about Linux getting better and better supported long term. I care more about making sure that I have a free and open platform in the future than I care about being able to play any particular game now. The best way for that to happen is more people developing for Linux. Maybe Proton will help by allowing more people to switch their primary OS to Linux, increasing demand for Linux SW, but ultimately I think living off Microsoft's scraps will not end well for Linux and direct support is needed. Anti-cheat already shows that emulation without developer support has its limits.
* Somewhat relatedly, I want more developers to be exposed to open source operating systems and software with the hope that they see how having full source access to the entire stack and liberal licenses for distributing modifications benefits everyone and will extend that philosophy to their own software where possible - and games are a particular type of software where the code of most games is pretty much worthless to competitors by the time the game is released but making it available can greatly benefit users through greater potential for modification and better options for long term maintenance.
* I like being appreciated. Do I really want to financially support someone who writes me off as a statistic? Sure, game developers need to eat and I understand that that sometimes means not being able to support minority platforms, but if profit is the only thing you are concerned about then being in games development is probably not the best way to achieve that anyway. Maybe you don't care about my platform - and that's fine, we can't all care about everything - but then it's only fair that I don't care about your game.
Meanwhile I have over 500 unplayed native games in my Steam library and, even with Proton, enough native games are being released that I will most likely never catch up. I do use Proton - like vanilla Wine before it - when there is something that seems interesting enough (mostly older games that have stood the test of time) but generally I just don't feel a need to. Even if I were to run out of native games and had to resort more to Proton, I am also much more willing to pay full price or even preorder when it comes to native games.
> I don't have time to track down audio issues for some random Linux version for 0.001% of players
Then don't? If you don't think it is worth your time to fix certain issues then you can always say that and people can get a refund if that is a deal breaker. Are you not going to release Windows builds because you can't work around some weird hardware issue or third-party tool messing with your game for 0.1% of your Windows users?
One good way for dealing with support load is to enable your community to do the grunt work for you by having a public issue tracker. This works especially well for the Linux community where more people will be used to reporting bugs rather than asking for support but is even something that I would suggest for Windows-only software as well. Valve has been using GitHub for this: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux
Surely this wouldn't make any sense for them strategically? They want as many people playing and making noise about the franchises they own as possible - especially multiplayer.
If Microsoft locks down their environment, I believe they are in danger of losing their dominance on PC.
I have yet to meet a developer that likes UWP and I believe it is dead by now. There is WinUI 3, but I fail to see how they learned from their mistakes. They believe they can work it out with rebranding, but I heavily doubt it. Don't know if my info is current, but you can only deploy WinUI through their store. I just shorty looked into it, laughed a bit and went elsewhere. I have already left the MS stack behind completely.
I don't think Microsoft cares about dominating the PC anymore. Their continued efforts to make Windows user-hostile suggest to me that they don't want PCs to even exist. They want everyone using a locked-down walled-garden tablet OS and paying for cloud services.
The other players survive because Nintendo and Sony pour a lot of money into exclusives and have an extensive back catalog, but Valve isn't making exclusive games for Linux.
Still, I want to offer a counter, because as linux is becoming more and more popular ( I myself am an anecdote since I recently jumped to PopOS as my main driver ), I worry that it will become another Windows. Linux principles are slowly being eroded for the ease and convenience of the user. It is both awesome and awful. Convenience destroyed mobile to me.
"Each Program Does One Thing Well."
followed by:
"Store Data in Flat Text Files."
I can't really say new programs adhere to either of these principles. In fact, it seems those seem to be actively shunned. I enjoy PopOS and I still have Vietnam flashback to my very first linux install way back when ( I installed it next to Win95 and results were not fun since it was my dad's PC ), but some things were better.. even if they were less user-friendly.
So yes. I think my real answer is yes -- it should be less user-friendly if that is the only way to maintain those pricinples.
They are being actively shunned, largely because they didn't actually work that well outside of running terminal programs that interfaced largely with ASCII text.
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=97
https://www.evanjones.ca/portable-linux-binaries.html
https://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/creating-portable-...
https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Portable_GNU-Linux_...
https://github.com/wheybags/glibc_version_header
In other words: there are a lot of steps and a lot of gotchyas to doing this that you're glossing over. Linux userland libraries are generally designed with the intention that an army of third-party maintainers will integrate all of this desperately developed software together and place it in a repo. Naturally every distribution wants to do things a little differently too, and they have a habit of changing it up every couple years. When you try to step out of that mold, even just to static link, things unsurprisingly become more difficult. Whereas Windows, Mac, Android, etc. have been designed since the beginning not to require that sort of thing and it is consequently a much, much more straightforward process.
I'm curious why, since you seem to believe the process is so straight-forward, you think it is that so few people distribute a simple binary? Why were Flatpak and AppImage invented?
But the "easy" solution is really that simple: compile on the oldest distro you want to support and statically link everything you can.
If you have additional requirements like needing a newer compiler or needing dynamic linking then there are more gotchas but even those are not really things that are hard to solve but rather things you need to be aware of.
And even those are all about ABIs not being forward compatible so you can't run things targeting newer system with older systems and instead need to take care to target the older ABIs that are still supported (or to remove unnecessary ABI depencencies). But that has nothing to do with fragmentation. You'd get that even if there was only a single distro.
Unless by fragmentation you mean that that no everyone is on the latest version supporting the ABI of your bleeding edge dev environment which is a ridiculous requirement that you only get if the ABI is frozen. Pretty much no platform has a forward-compatible ABI except if you count dead ones that don't change at all.
I do agree that toolchains should make it easier to target older ABIs. Something to control the target glibc version akin to the WINVER or _WIN32_WINNT macros would be really nice to have. But again, unless have some nonstandard requirements, just compiling on the oldest distro you want to support and statically linking most things works.
> I'm curious why, since you seem to believe the process is so straight-forward, you think it is that so few people distribute a simple binary?
Plenty peole do. Unity spits out such binaries (+data) most games outside of steam are distributed like this.
OSS projects often don't bother because they can get into distro repos. Some do though.
> Why were Flatpak and AppImage invented?
Besides sandboxing (which users care about, not apps), Flatpak and AppImage primarily make it trivial to distribute software that was designed for the distribution model where it depends on other libraries in the distribution. They also try to solve desktop integration which is not important for Games.
Even if you could not easily distribute binary software without Flatpak et. al, nothing is stopping devs from using those tools for games distribution so I hardly see how their existence is an argument for fragmentation making it harder .
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC...
a lot of software houses in gaming have been working very hard to give windows a competitive advantage in terms of gaming experience
in exchange for what? they've been enriching microsoft and proudly so
thankfully someone understood that there is a system you can use for free to build cool stuff on top, that doesn't try to lock you in, doesn't exploit dominant positions to push other software on you, and doesn't come with a 5 kilometres long terms of services, I really am unable to understand why people just keep liking being microsoft's guinea pigs
One thing: stay the hell away from my kernel. I use Linux for the freedom it gives me. If you are going to install a rootkit just so I don't aim-bot in your precious little game, the deal is off.
I'll keep a close eye this year on how do you install Steam's layer on Linux. `sudo` will not be ever involved! If I can't install it just in my $HOME directory without kernel shenanigans then they'll get a huge "Nope!" from me.
For example, I used to give a huge population boost to computer opponents in Rome: Total War, so they would be able to field big armies for me to crush. Without it they quickly depleted their manpower pool and after the initial clash the game turned into a tedious mopping.
Another tool like Cheat Engine that has no Linux eqivalent is Flawless Widescreen [0], although Gamescope at least makes the games playable.
I've already moved to Linux for a lot of stuff, because frankly, it just plays games better than Windows 10/11. For example, stepmania (a rhythm game) stutters like mad for me on Windows and I've never been able to figure out why - and the debugging process in Windows is akin to black magic. On Linux it just runs buttery smooth with 0 stutters. I can't wait until more games are native ported to Linux and/or run well in Proton, and I can finally use a single, good OS for everything.
However I notice on these forums in particular when other tech companies do similar it isn't seen so charitably.
I speak with a slightly cynical tone because I've seen this story before - the catalyst to the changing public opinion has been less about what the companies actually do and more about when competitors emerge and engage PR campaigns to recast the incumbent as evil and the newcomer as a saviour.
One should keep their eyes open to see if the same happens to Valve.
* The open source Vulkan driver for AMD graphics
* DXVK, the DirectX 12 to Vulkan wrapper
* Proton
* SDL, a cross-platform support library for native development
* Gamescope display server to wrap games that e.g. have bad support for your monitor resolution
All of these are immensely useful even independently of Valves platform or proprietary software and this is by no means a complete list of the extend of their contributions. I don't think its unreasonable that they are praised even if their actions are ultimately self-serving.
But this is a huge step. They are ahead of the competition. If the competition wants to offer something better than Steam they now need to invest heavily in linux support which increases the costs of development significantly.
Nope, DOTA 2 is a native Linux game: https://steamdb.info/app/570/config/
Way more than I can say of Sony whose support I would describe as adversarial in my several encounters. Most recently, after fifteen years of using PSN, hundreds of purchases, thousands of dollars, my account stopped working with ANY of my credit cards or PayPal - all orders fail. Their advice? Will not fix, buy gift cards from Amazon.
Is that a figure of speech or a reference to the fact that the hardware preview coverage is dropping today (I believe)?
The DOTA2 community has had to deal with these aspects of Valve for years. CS:GO is now also essentially a forgotten project, and within the span of just a couple of months, the FPS crowd is moving on to other newcomer games.
This might be armchair speculation but it seems like since Google is making so much money from ads and Valve is making so much money from Steam, that their projects don't really get the kind of management and focus from the organization that is mutually compatible with the other stakeholders - customers, players, tournament organizers, businesses, etc. These are drops in the ocean compared to their real revenue streams.
I guess as far as this particular story is concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if Valve just abandoned this project at some point too once it's launched, and moved on to something else. At least in this case they've done a great amount of work for open-source which is fantastic because others can build on their contributions. I don't really expect these aspects of the culture at Valve to change in this regard, as frustrating as it is from the outside, I'm sure it makes a lot more sense from the inside.
I opened Steam the other day, and by default it’s filtered to only show the games my system can play. I was curious how many games I’d lost to Apple dropping support for 32 bit, I’d never looked before. I can play 94 of my 345 Steam games.
My heart literally sunk when I saw this.
Valve has the technology. Wine runs on macOS. Just need to apply it to Steam for Mac.
If Apple treats its platform like this, let it rot.
And it's not just things like outdated APIs (OpenGL), but various tasks related to preparing a distributable program in this time (with codesigning etc.)
Maybe install Crossover and play the Windows versions of games through there?
Windows 8 was bad for them selling games. Microsoft showed their hand at wanting an Apple-like walled garden. They made their own OS to sell games. They want to sell games.
There are a lot more Mac users to sell games to than Linux users or even potential Linux users. Mac users are far more willing to pay for software. If you can sell more games to Mac users, that’s money from selling games for Valve. They want to sell games.
Fine, they want to sell games. They can still sell games to Mac users. If the back catalog isn't quite there, that's probably not a huge deal, as it's not exactly where the most money is made.
Could they go ahead and license Crossover, today, for every Steam user that tries to open a 32-bit game on macOS? Probably! Could they slap together a distribution of Proton for Mac? Absolutely (and for a time, it existed)!
But my guess is that the Apple juice just isn't worth the squeeze. It's probably not super important to their strategy, it's probably not going to yield back enough profit to be worth it, and if it were really so easy I suspect they would have furthered their work on Proton for Mac (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344).
What a timeline we're in.
Of course, there are also other projects like FAudio that do an awesome job!
Regarding the Steam Deck, I'm on the queue for the preorder, since still need to wait 18 days to do it.
And I also agree that the benefit for the community is enormous as well. I am watching what Valve is doing very closely as an example of how commercial interests and free software can benefit eachother.