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Comment by Telaneo | Hacker News Reader

That anecdote goes the other way if you skew towards popular multiplayer games, since those are the ones with anti-cheat. Someone who plays League, Apex, PUBG, and Destiny 2, and was really looking forward to BF6, will be mightily disappointed. You're unlikely to be invested in all of those games, but a pretty large amount of people are very, very invested in at-least one of those, which, unfortunately, makes Linux a non-starter for them.

Even if 99% of games worked fine on Linux, a large amount of people spend 50+% of their time in-game in one of those games, so it doesn't end up feeling like 90+% of games work.

Thankfully, the corollary of that is that single-player games pretty much all work, barring some edge cases, like very recent titles that haven't had the kinks ironed out yet.

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The death of a server browser and privately owned servers led to this. The whole anti-cheat situation grew from publishers wanting to control the whole experience.

Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.

It really is impressive how many they are willing to leave behind. A quick check gives about 19% of the market.

Not really sure why you're trying to draw a connection between private servers and anti-cheat, I understand if that's your pet grievance but they really aren't related. Games were already implementing anti-cheat even when server browsers were the norm. The "anti-cheat situation" grew out of cheaters killing multiplayer games. What are you even trying to imply with "wanting to control the whole experience"? Letting your players actually play the game they paid for is a bad thing now? When cheaters are in the game, you do not get to play it in any meaningful sense, and in short order a literal sense as servers rapidly die off. Note that I'm not endorsing kernel anti-cheat, but you didn't say kernel anti-cheat, but instead went on a polemic against the concept of anti-cheat in general.

I apologise not being clear before, I really wanted to mean kernel level anti-cheat.

Besides, in privately owned servers you were protect via human mods, who were there playing with you. They would bring down the banhammer when a sufficiently suspicious player was deemed as cheating. That is the biggest issue nowadays, one that has brought the bar even higher for anti-cheat solutions. They are now the ONLY line of defense. It really is clear as day that anti-cheat solutions got more and more intrusive as more games stopped allowing third-party servers to exist.

I'm a game dev, I see this, I understand the intentions, I get the consequences. In many ways the intentions weren't bad, it does create a more unified competitive experience. But it made it impossible to not resort to kernel level anti-cheat, even though it is a fruitless effort as so much of the game still needs to be rendered by the end-user's machine (of course, the grim reality is that cloud streaming is the end goal for any competitive game if we continue down this path).

There are so many problems with human mods. For one, they have lives and sleep. A community server should ideally be run 24/7 (because otherwise finding new servers all the time sucks and massively degrades the experience relative to the convenience of matchmaking), but when there are no mods around, the server is liable to be ruined. This can lead to the long-term stagnation or even death of the server.

And human mods suck. Really, really suck. They don't have perfect information, and their false positive / negative rate is probably an order of magnitude worse than an anti-cheat. Even a perfectly neutral moderator is bad at judging. And perfectly neutral moderators don't exist. It was not remotely uncommon to be banned from a server for killing the admin too many times.

This is exacerbated by the fact that moderating itself sucks. Moderators are there to play the game. Actually moderating on the side of that is a burden. This leads to the same incentive structure that you see all over the internet, where volunteer moderation mostly attracts people who are interested in power tripping, because otherwise there's very little appeal, and bad actors are more common than people willing to do it out of the goodness of their heart.

There are great points about private server browsers, but it's also just a massive pain to find servers that both have a gameplay configuration you like and also have decent moderation. Improving anti-cheat systems was the obvious way forward rather than relying on humans who are much more fallible. Kernel anti-cheat should fortunately only be a stopgap solution and not something that is here to stay in the industry. Kernel anti-cheat was a result of the failure of Windows to provide sufficient security features themselves. Riot's Vanguard doesn't rely on kernel access for macOS, and Microsoft is actively working on improving the kernel security such that it shouldn't be necessary on Windows in the future either. With any luck we'll be able to forget this era of anti-cheat in a few years.

> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.

The gaming industry is thoroughly multi-platform, and many games that are limited to Windows on general-purpose PCs aren't so because the require DirectX, since they've also been developed for Playstation where DirectX isn't a thing.

Support for Mac can be somewhat challenging, partly because the platform (including the hardware) is so different from other general-purpose PCs, and partly because Apple doesn't particularly care about backwards compatibility, and will happily break applications if it suits their interest.

However, a developer that doesn't support Linux does so because they don't want to for whatever reason, not because the technical bar is too high. With the work that has gone into Wine, Proton, and other Windows compatibility libraries these days, there's a good chance that a Windows game will "just work" unless the developer does something to actively inhibit it.

DirectX has such a pull for game devs Sony has made a so called PlayStation Shader Language (PSSL), made to be very similar to the HLSL standard in DirectX 12. Granted this was an effort to meet where devs are, given how difficult it was to develop for the PS3. But then again, that's where devs are.

I mentioned DirectX as a clear enough example, but there are other decisions just like it.

Hell, most studios use Unreal nowadays, it already has their own RHI (Rendering Hardware Interface) between them and the graphics API. It really isn't much effort to start new projects targetting Metal or Vulkan.

Some have noticed this section of the market, in which they can grow, like Ubisoft and Capcom (see their games on Mac and iOS) which is why I said it's slowly changing. And that demonstrates it really isn't difficult.

Funny note: Have heard from a bird that Ubisoft's many engines had Vulkan support so their games could run under Google Stadia's servers. As soon as that got killed so did those engine branches. This just shows it isn't difficult at all. And it isn't a surprise they also acknowledged this by now using Metal to reach Apple's users.

But anti-cheat was first developed in a time where server browsers were the norm. Punkbuster was developed back in 2000 (independently of Valve) for HL1/CS, which had no matchmaking system. So you're just plain wrong about the motivation.

Punkbuster isn't tied to a kernel, that was what I meant.

If you think game devs are drinking koolaid, do note that there's always loud minority of linux advocates on forums like these, saying 'it works' and when expanding further it turns out they had to do a ton of tweaking and setup. Just look at the comments on getting Overwatch2 to work on linux for an example.

Fact of the matter is most of the game dev's audience is on windows, and for a time it had good tools/documentation for graphics debugging as well. That momentum carried over. It made practical sense to have main development be on windows.

The industry is failing, and there is still plenty of market to grow. Ubisoft and Capcom have realized this, others can as well. It makes no sense to leave 19% of the market on the table. It isn't 2006 anymore.

Failing in that in doesn't live up to the ideals of the linux community? I suppose so.

> It makes no sense to leave 19% of the market on the table

What's your source? Steam Hardware Survey says it's 2.68% linux and probably steam deck users.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I'm counting Mac, as other posts in this thread suggest.

Again, source? Hardware survey says 5% mac and linux.

Using Steam as a benchmark for Mac users will always result in lower percentages, as Apple has a more established gaming hub / store themselves.

For example, this game is on Apple Store (for Mac)⋮

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-evil-village-for-mac/...

Not on Steam:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1196590/discussions/0/3484123...

Same happens with Ubisoft titles.

But, regarding the source, here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

I do agree the way these are gathered is not perfect. But closer to reality, or would you assume Mac presence in lower than Linux?

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