The alternative is requiring publishers to remove their DRM, and use Valve’s, and they (the publishers) most certainly would not do that. I’d bet that if Valve tried that, there’d be an antitrust lawsuit against them real quick. It sucks, but the alternative is getting the DRM to work on Linux, so that’s what they chose.
The arms race between game publishers and the small minority of gamers who actually cheat is harmful to everyone else. Stub the DRM APIs to usefully return nothing quickly rather than enabling voyeurs who think scanning and logging the contents of people's hard drives on their servers is acceptable.
I've heard of some online-only games - such as Fall Guys - being basically killed sales-wise by insufficient anti-cheat protection.
After all, if another player can run faster or fly or has perfect aim, everyone else is basically playing an unwinnable game.
This isn't helped by the current fashion for automatic match-making and 100-player battle royale games - which make one cheater impact a lot more players.
> if another player can run faster or fly or has perfect aim, everyone else is basically playing an unwinnable game.
Not a gamer, so forgive me if the proposal is stupid, why not just treat cheaters like they do on (li)chess? If I am playing with someone that I believe to be cheating, I flag/blacklist that user and simply don't play with that user afterwards. That by itself is enough for me to play against only honest players, but if you want to be more strict you could even submit the game session for review, and in case it is ruled there was cheating, the cheater is banned and every game you lost to the cheater is awarded to you.
User reports are indeed a common tranche of anti-cheat systems.
But in chess terms "Middling player occasionally made suspiciously good moves" is a pretty weak cheat report. But if you can tell they had stockfish running and changed windows to it several times in the course of the game? Well, now you've got a very clear cheat report.
More broadly, many gamers are chasing the dopamine rush of winning, complete with slot-machine-style flashing lights, music and dancing character animations. Being awarded a win by e-mail a day or two later doesn't really compare.
What if the cheater is just running stockfish on a separate laptop, is the anti-cheat system also going to turn on the webcam and track eye movement?
> Being awarded a win by e-mail a day
That is only half of the story. The other half would be in banning the cheater and making them lose access to their account, i.e, impute a real monetary cost to being caught cheating. Make it expensive for those caught cheating and equally expensive for those making false reports and I'd venture that we would see some sort of equilibrium where cheating is not worth it.
The cost can (should) be progressive for repeated offenses, and it can be divided if multiple people make the same (wrong) call. Say you get one "free" report per month, but you don't lose it if either you were correct and/or more than 5 people reported the same person.
The important thing is not about being "perfectly provably fair", it is just to curb abuse (on either side) so that people still can have fun playing without having to accept such invasive software on their machines.
Overwatch briefly had a system like this, where you could mark players in your matches positively or negatively, so they'd be more or less likely to show up in your future matches. They had to remove it after a top level player could no longer find fair matches. He was waiting 10-20 minutes before getting matched with much lower skilled players. He was by all accounts a pleasant person, but he was so good at the game that many people would mark him negatively simply so they would never have to play against him.
You fix that by adding handicaps. Not only it solves the problem of lower-skilled players still being interested in playing better opponents, it gives top-level players a way to continue improving their own game even when the opposition is weak.
> going to get tired of playing handicapped games against 1000 Elo noobs.
False dichotomy. What about playing 1800 players but starting with only one bishop? Or how about playing the same 1800 players get to use some assistance that warns of blunders/mistakes, but does not give away the better moves? It's only "cheating" if it is not agreed beforehand...
Also, bear in mind that your Overwatch example gave the impression that the good/honest player was so above the others that even without the opponent flagging system, the above-average player would be matching with "boring" games most of the time. Removing the opponent rating system does not solve his problem and still leaves the cheating issue open.
If breaking DRM was that simple, DRM companies wouldn’t exist; Games would be cracked on day 1 (or earlier). It’s way more complicated than that, and each DRM system is different.
That’s why Wine doesn’t do well with DRM. For example, some systems rely on undocumented behavior in Windows’ APIs that Wine doesn’t implement.
The small minority of gamers who cheat impact the experience for a much larger number of customers who don't. So each cheater might cause dozens of lost subscriptions. (Contrast to software piracy, where each pirated copy only represents a probability between 0 and 1 of a lost sale.)
