Indeed. Valve established DRM to a degree many previously hoped it would get rejected. But they offered a decent service and proved that piracy is a service problem. What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular. Not many people use it yet, but Windows does look less and less like a dependable long term solution, especially with Microsofts other ambitions in that industry.
>What they did for Linux as a gaming platform is spectacular.
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.
Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!"
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.
>Oh please. Any time a company does something good. "Let's not kid ourselves. It's all for the money, honey!"
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.
Valve is valued at $10+ billion. They're not big tech in the style of Microsoft, however they are a mega corporation (a very large company). Any company with their scale, revenue and influence is a mega corporation. If Valve had been public in this extreme stock market era, they'd probably have gotten a $30+ billion valuation (Unity at the peak was worth $60 billion).
Gabe Newell is worth $8 billion courtesy of his ownership stake.
They are still beholden to the whims of those who stand to benefit the most from the company making a profit, even if they aren't "shareholders" as such.
But that is very different, every company owned by shareholders starts behaving in exactly the same predictable manner. However as long as the founders controls everything the company behaves as the founder wishes, it could be good or even worse than what you'd get with shareholders. On average it is probably the same but for an individual company it still matters a lot.
Yes, but they are not subject to the whims of short-term "investors" who only care about maximizing the next quarter or financial year's numbers.
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.
> There is no elsewhere, when you consider network effects
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?
Most of the social interaction in the games space happens on discord these days though, and has since about 2016. The only social network effect steam currently has is with game invites, since it's slightly more annoying to join a party of friends via the xbox version of sea of thieves than the steam version, for example.
I’ve been using Xbox Game Pass on PC, and while for me it’s a good value. Their invite system is terrible compared to Valve. I just want to play games with my friends and Valve seems to have that part down. Hell even the whole “play with friends” thing has worked great. Like the good old days of friends coming over and playing a four player game only now we play on the internet (and we only need one person to own it).
Exactly, mom & pop shop doing it for the money too. Mom & Pop good at making pies, you’re good at fixing cars. Instead of bartering, you exchange cash. Mom & Pop happy their car is fixed, you get pies in return. Everyone is happy, every one benefits, despite money exchanged. No one sceptical that mom & pop doing it for cash.
Doing something for money does not mean that you can't be interested in what the effects of your work have on others and it abusolutely does not mean that you have to prioritize the amount of money you make over everything else - but for publicly traded companies the incentives do push that way and that's where the cynicism comes from.
OK, but Steam has a near-monopoly on games, Spotify has a near-monopoly on music, and both of these are working great for me as a consumer.
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.
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.)
Well they have all tried breaking Steam's dominance on PC. The ones that come closest are probably Microsoft (especially with their acquisition of Activision Blizzard) and Epic. Almost all of them still publish on Steam, because they basically have to.
Gog and Funcom are drops in the ocean in comparison.
> I'm utterly uninterested in a world where I have to remember which platform that game was on.
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 bought a few on GoG too, mostly because they were old games that aren't on Steam, and DRM-free :) Happy to support that! But I'm not signing up to Galaxy.
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 think this is just because we misuse the word monopoly.
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.
There is never any 100% monopoly in other sectors either unless it's something government enforced where only one company is allowed to do something. What matters is that a significant amount of consumers do not have a choice of dealing with with the company in question if they want certain types of things. That is true in tech if you define the "type of thing" narrowly enough and is true nowhere if you define it broadly enough. The debate of where you draw the line is independt of the terms used.
Privately owned and operated means that squeezing out a little more profit hasn't much influence on the owner's wealth. Which happens to be the decisionmaker's wealth. And there's a real possibility that they will care how their money gets to them. But being publicly traded changes everything, suddenly a crowdsourced projection of profits into the future enters the picture, leveraged to the nth degree. This even affects companies still held by a strong founder majority. And when decisions are delegated to the salaried class, incentivized by options and bonus mechanisms, the payoff magnification effect gets even stronger. Suddenly a percentage point change in profits can cause a tenfold change in personal wealth. Or more. When there are tradeoffs to be made between decency and greed, always bet on the public company outdoing the private. It's not a guaranteed win, there are some truly nasty examples of privates, but they are outliers. Publicly traded means nasty by design.
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.
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.
Yeah I think the main takeaway for me is that the work they are doing for Linux isn’t being kept only to themselves. Betting on Linux is giving people options. I would love to drop windows all together, and they are making this more of a reality (because the only key thing keeping me on windows is gaming, I can get all my other regular computing just fine on Linux).
I don't think anyone is implying they did it for any other reason. Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it.
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."
>Only a bunch of people jumping on to a seemingly good thing a company did to be a killjoy about it.
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 that Valve should be above complaint. I'm also annoyed when people show up in threads about WSL or VS Code or whatever else that Microsoft does just to be like "Stop liking this, Microsoft is evil". I'm just saying that "But they're a company so nothing they do can be good" is a generic response without anything interesting behind it. You can post it on every thread about every action done by every company and it will be true.
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.
> Why should other billion dollar tech companies get a pass? Or why the double standards?
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.
Exactly. "It's all for the money" is a generally useless thing to point out. It's the table stakes of living in the modern world unless you want to join a commune somewhere. Most folks on here generally expect corporations to do things against our interest as consumers, and that's generally the state of things. That said, we would rather they do SOME positive things and not NO positive things.
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.
> 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,
GOOD! That means our incentives are aligned, and the arrangement is much more likely to survive long-term.
They could've choose to go proprietary with all their software, locked down proton, locked down their OS, locked down their hardware, locked down everything.
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.
> Valve established DRM to a degree many previously hoped it would get rejected.
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.
I remember how difficult it was to setup Wine and to play a game, Valve made it much easier. I remember some games even with Wine, wouldn't run with complete compatibility or wouldn't work. Installing Steam on Linux is pretty easy.
I've gotten a virus only twice in my life. Both times, it was an ad on the cyanide and happiness website. The worst thing that's ever happened to me from pirating games is the keygen having loud unexpected music.
To add on this: Valve works with upstream developers on upstream code, so their work benefits the whole FOSS ecosystem. They are funding a lot of kernel, Mesa, Wayland, Wine and KDE developers.
Here's hoping that Valve's next round of investments in the stack puts some focus on the needs of streamers, on the basis that getting streamers into the SteamOS/Linux tech stack may introduce the topic to a wider audience.
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.
I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me.
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 feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming. I have sort of an overview of what is going on, but a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me.
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.
> I feel like I am in a "late-game" stage of gaming ... a major percentage of games simply look not interesting (anymore) to me.
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.
Absolutely. I've been stubborn in the past five years or so about Linux gaming where if a game doesn't work, I just don't play it. And as time went on in the past few years, more and more games just... started working out of the box. Maybe 30% of games worked a few years back and now probably 98% work.
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.
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.
Yeah, the specific issue is from the first mission where you have to watch a TV segment to continue. Problem is, the proton version isn't built with a package to play video files within the game engine itself. So while video files can be played during things like startup, that's about it. It's a fair amount of work to fix it and it makes noise in my steam setup.. and honestly, it's not that worth it to me.
I vehemently disagree with sentiment expressed in the article. Sure, on the surface the work done Valve does significantly improve the state of Linux gaming. But this is not Linux gaming. This is Windows gaming under Linux. We need to think about the long-term effects, about maintaining a healthy ecosystem. I cannot imagine how delegating Linux and Vulkan to be a long-term emulator of DX12 and Win is supposed to be healthy. What about platform autonomy? Shouldn't we strive towards a future where Vulkan is a strong, independent API with its own voice and not just an interface for emulating DX12? And one where game developers actively want to support Linux as first class citizen and not just make Windows games and putting all the burden of compatibility on the maintainers of the emulation layer.
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?
The Linux Desktop community has had 20 years to make Linux Desktop a reasonable, if not attractive, platform for gaming and game development and they have consistently and utterly failed at it. Valve did the only thing that was going to work.
That is true. Proton is a pragmatic solution. But it hardly a satisfactory solution, and I worry that it is not sustainable solution either. I do not really have a horse in the run personally, as I am not a Linux user (my platform of choice is macOS), but as a GPU programming enthusiast I dislike anything that gives Microsoft more power.
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.
It doesn't have to be forever. The biggest problem with Linux gaming was simply the games you want to play don't run and the ones you did want to play the, makers had no incentive to distribute a linux build. This bridges that gap, removes a lot of friction for game makers to support linux and with the steam deck it could give them millions of new users to target. It's a massive step in the right direction, IMO.
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.
> but as a GPU programming enthusiast I dislike anything that gives Microsoft more power.
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.
Much more than that, in my mind, is linux-native steam installations.
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 have reluctantly reached this exact conclusion. Sure, I wish Linux were a growing target for developers, but after living through Loki/Icculus ports and Wine/Crossover/Transgaming/Proton, the only practical approach is the latter, it seems. I've made my peace with it.
If Valve makes it possible to play many/most games on Linux then an influx of Linux converts may incentivise more native development.
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.
Recent release of the Windows 11 with requirements to have at least 8th gen CPU might help actually. My 6th gen is perfectly fine for a lot of games, and thanks to Valve I have quite a good library on Ubuntu.
Same was said for Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10 and probably many other times. Microsoft is not that stupid - they are doing these changes only after they are confident that they can get away with it and can easily change their strategy if needed.
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.
Someone better educated than me can probably help me out here, but I think you're either misunderstanding what some things are, or mixing up your terminology.
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.
I was not mentioning Proton explicitly. But the core of my point is that Proton de-facto delegates Vulkan to be a second class citizen whose purpose it is to serve as a backend of implementing a Microsoft-compatible technology stack. With Proton working well, the incentive to develop native Linux applications and games goes to wards zero — why would you even bother if you can just develop and test for Windows and let the Proton maintainers sort out the rest?
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)?
If there is a native Vulkan backend there is little reason for an API emulation layer with an identical before-and-after to not just forward the calls on as much as possible - especially with an API which makes its state a lot more explicit and keeps less internal state.
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.
This comment is loaded with some pretty unrealistic conclusions. Firstly, Vulkan support is becoming extremely common even on Windows-exclusive titles.
> 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.
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).
If I may, I suspect your angle on this might be slightly askew at least from my perspective. Almost all the major game engines are now supporting a native vulkan/linux renderer. I'm running in godot 4 right now. If anything, watching things like glorious eggrolls proton and the dxvk repo [1] I think the people working at the direct translation level are causing more eyes on vulkan than it would otherwise be getting.
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.
Are you saying it's the case that running a game on Proton on Linux is a superior experience to running it natively on Vulkan?
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.
> If gamers are just going to skip Linux entirely without Proton
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.
OP lauds their WINE-like extensions, but there is much more they are doing.
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.
We need boots on the ground. We need people installing Linux rather than making excuses about why they can't.
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.
I dig most of this article, and I do applaud the work Valve is doing for the Linux gaming ecosystem, but I draw a line at supporting kernel level anti-cheat drivers. That trend in gaming bothers me to no end, and I refuse to knowingly install a game that features one.
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.
If I played competitive video games seriously I would absolutely want them to take cheating seriously and take any necessary measure to stop it. At the same time I think they should also make the most serious kernel/driver level anti-cheat software optional. If you don't to want to install it you can still play the game, just not on any of the 'pro' servers.
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.
The serious cheats in competitive games these days don't rely on hacking the game anymore. They use a separate computer connected taking your HDMI out as an input and then controls your mouse and keyboard inputs. They use ML models and OpenCV. You watch the second computer's monitor and it draws huge boxes around things you shoot and it assists your aim. It doesn't even have to be a PC game, you can do the same with consoles and a computer.
The average cheater is most certainly not investing in thousands of dollars of hardware to run intense AI models on a second high power machine. These are mostly theoretical hacks.
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.
You don't need thousands of dollars of hardware. You need one (1) Raspberry Pi 4, plus an HDMI capture card and a Raspberry Pi Zero to act as fake mouse/keyboard. You can totally do that for $50. (Probably less if you use an Arduino clone instead of a Raspberry Pi Zero.)
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.
It boils down to a risk assessment. The fact is people interested in cheating continue to escalate the norm. That's the arms race.
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.
Let's not forget that a large need for anti-cheat comes from focus on centralized matchmaking overr community-hosted and community-moderated servers that were more common before the game industry's focus on monetizing their games to the last bit.
The people they do buy cheats from do the work and effort. They don't seem especially bothered by kernel-level anti cheat stuff. It keeps them in business, since they get less quick home-brewed competition.
The big issue is not the existence of cheating, but the scale of the problem. A software hack is infinitely scalable, a hardware setup is not.
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.
Heuristic anti-cheat works about as well as heuristic anti-spam. It might actually catch more legit players than cheaters, due to the false positive paradox[1].
No, not even. Your average cheater these days are C and D tier streamers who feel a pressure to perform and have a budget. And it's far easier to do this than you think. They keep getting caught out doing this type of cheat specifically.
They're buying trained models from people who have the fancy hardware.
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.
This is why anti-cheat should be performance based. Build a model based on the way that verified elite players play the game, and their performance. Compare “normal” players against the model and look for outliers. Manually review accounts that look suspicious.
Cheat behavior is obvious. Ridiculous long distance accuracy. Weird movement. Weird map awareness. Weird awareness of other players. Etc.
They did make one. It was called FairFight[1] and was mainly used by EA in the Battlefield franchise. It also was a dumpster fire: bans were applied to legit players all the time, moderators were overwhelmed and manual review took too long and many times resulted in nothing.
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.
As a former CSGO player (not a very competitive one) this trust factor really sucks, and Valve oversells it.
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.
This is kinda weird, CSGO has spinbots and xp-farming bots: one moves faster than is humanly possible, the other moves on the spot or in a circle with exact constant rotation ... the only conclusion I can make is CSGO want these bots, because auto-blocking them seems trivial.
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?
> 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.
Incorrect, there’s lots of cheats that are completely seamless and just improve your performance without being a completely binary “perfect headshot” vs “always miss” or something.
I guess your last encounter with aimbots was in the early 00s…
The great part is many games have the aimbot built in. Players use a hardware dongle to make a keyboard/mouse look like a controller input, and the game applies aim-assist to the keyboard/mouse input.
You don't get mouse axis movement though -- it emulates it through a Controller stick so it's not exactly an ergonomic and mouse-like experience, from what I have heard.
Have you ever played Warzone? People sniping 700+ meters and they can't even see you on their screen. Obvious map hacks, aim bots, and even some hilarious shit like super speed or the ability to drive a car through walls to run you over.
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.
Warzone is weird. I can't understand why speedhacks, 'silent aim' (you can shoot in a direction different from your view angle) or flying cars are even a thing.
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.
In proper competitive gaming (ie. with a prize pool) you can apply much more rigorous standards like kyc, a live video feed; even standardized hardware and drug tests.
In magic the gathering, the standards are divided in three: casual (called regular), competitive and professional. Basically the competitive mode is for people who play the game to win, sometimes with small prizes, but still want a very clean playing field. I feel that the standardized hardware and drug tests are feasible at professional, but not competitive, and anti cheat rootkits is interesting in competitive.
The area between thinking others are "absolutely not cheating" and "definitely cheating" is huge, and where most online gamers end up spending their time. Absolutely cheating is not a problem, because most games allow you to report people, and they'll get enough reports and be banned shortly. Not being able to tell is the problem, because you feel something was unfair (which you might also feel when it actually is fair), but you feel it more often and it leads to poor experiences and people quitting the game.
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.
The setup makes it impractical. You would need a very powerful computer to run it in real time. And it won't tell you about what u can't see. You would need to do the same for audio and game mechanics.
Check what a top player can do: https://youtu.be/8Qf5Xlty1Cg
I doubt an AI will be anywhere close in the next 10 years.
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.
I like to think this crowd is above typical streamer hysteria, but I guess not?
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.
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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.
The AI doesn't have to play the game, just recognise enemy players and calculate how many pixels to move the mouse so that you are aiming at their head. Even the top player you showed could probably have improved his run quite a bit if instead of having to aim he got a guaranteed headshot every time he fired his gun in the vicinity of an enemy.
You have to tune cheat tools down or your stats will get you banned. An abnormally high headshot rate is a sure way to get banned.
That's where anticheat is going imo: algorithmiclly defining what the fastest more precise human should be capable of. Anything beyond that is "cheating".
While there are convincing looking proof of concepts for computer vision based cheats, I haven't seen anything to suggest that this approach is used meaningfully anywhere. And considering the millions of cheat bans that get processed in mainstream games to this day, I think its safe to assume most cheaters aren't using anything sophisticated.
And aren't the existing anti-cheat technologies the reason that cheats take that form?
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.
> 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…
> The serious cheats in competitive games these days don't rely on hacking the game anymore.
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).
Every time I hear about the seeing through walls hacks, I wonder why the developer just doesn't send the other users locations unless it should be visible.
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.
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.
I'm talking about steam accounts. There are many cheaters our there, who just dont care if they lose an account. They will cheat on an alternative Account and when they get banned, they will buy a new one. They dont even care spending some bucks on the Game again.
Edit: Take Rust as an example. A year ago, the Developers made some stats public: 12 Million copies sold, 600.000 Banned Accounts. Thats 5% of all sold Accounts.
There is even a Twitter Feed, showing all the Bans:https://twitter.com/rusthackreport
Most of the Accounts will show a Playtime of under 30 hours in the Game, mostly no Friends or other games, indicating they were only made for cheating.
I'm amazed at how much money some people have to burn on new accounts. Looking at minecraft servers, there are so ridiculously many people banned.
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.
Oh yes, absolutely. There are a number of "alt shops" selling Minecraft accounts accounts for a few cents each.
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.
As someone who does play competitive video games seriously, rather than having anti-cheat, I would prefer to play on servers/ladders where the players are vetted and where getting caught cheating has meaningful social implications. Open-for-all servers with accounts that are trivial to make is the problem to me.
I agree, and I think that like DRM anti-cheat is generally a customer-hostile losing battle. The big problem is that companies are trying to solve a social problem (cheating) with a technological solution and, predictably, failing. Partly this is motivated by profit: if you required online gamers to be real verifiable people, with all suspected cheating was judged by a human being, and bans were permanent and landed you on a watch list for other games, cheating would probably drop dramatically but so would sign-ups and your ability to resell the game to the new account of a cheater who's old account was banned.
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 agree, and I think that like DRM anti-cheat is generally a customer-hostile losing battle. The big problem is that companies are trying to solve a social problem (cheating) with a technological solution and, predictably, failing.
I don't disagree with your general take, but you can't accuse Valve Anti Cheat of being a failure.[0]
I think a lot of the prevalence of cheating has to have some economic roots. A certain kind of cheater, the kind who buy new accounts (maybe with new cosmetics) every time they are banned, isn't necessarily someone a company wants to get rid of permanently.
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.
It can't. There's not much more to say, even with the current anticheat it's no way to be certain a real human being clicked a real mouse. As the other comment shows, you can start adding more and more invasive monitoring solutions but this likely won't be tolerated by many and will eventually be bypassed anyway.
The problem with this logic is that most multiplayer games have post-sale economies with cosmetics and other add-ons, and I would guess that most of those sales comes from casual players.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 disagree. As someone who plays online shooters only casually once or twice a week, nothing sucks more than having a full session in Apex ruined by an obvious cheater. The fact that I don't spend 8 hours a day doing this makes it far worse for me, the time for gaming is very limited when you have a small child and having it ruined because of some script kiddies is incredibly demoralizing.
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.
Yes, but as many other people have said - no technical solution will elminiate all cheaters, but aggressive anti cheat does make a positive difference to the experience. It can make a difference between running into cheaters in 1 out of 10 games vs running into cheaters every single game.
And yes, community moderation is great, except that it has mostly gone away in most games.
I doubt that there's anything a kernel-level anti cheat will catch that a normal won't (if we're not talking about very sophisticated cheats we see in pro competitions of course). I'd happy to be proven wrong but those companies don't even release statistics on the efficiency.
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.
> If you don't to want to install it you can still play the game, just not on any of the 'pro' servers.
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.
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.
I'd be interested to hear your opinion defending professional sports taking itself as seriously as it does then. From my perspective, the only thing that makes it serious is the amount of money and advertising involved.
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.
> I'd be interested to hear your opinion defending professional sports taking itself as seriously as it does then.
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.
I did a lot of cheat development and always read the related forums.
Let me tell you that kernel anti-cheats are the funniest and ugliest pieces of software out there.
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.
As a person in the industry: Everything this person is saying is true.
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.
As someone in the industry, would you mind weighing in on Vanguard, the kernel level anti-cheat used for Valorant?
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.
I don’t have the code for that and it might require my studio to open a deal with vanguard to get access to the source.
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.
This comment deserves a much more detailed response than I'm able to give at the moment, but I can give some very brief thoughts:
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.
I would submit that this is more an issue of trust than it is an issue of forcing client machines into compliance. Because of the industries persistent belief that anti-cheat is somehow an effective strategy, let alone a morally acceptable one, has meant that development of systems that develop player trust in others has totally atrophied.
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."
Sure. But people want to run games on general purpose machines.
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 not saying "You just need more humans to review and kick cheaters".
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.
I've had good experience in games with human moderation and recorded demos that you can play back to catch and report cheaters. After building some reputation and trust in the community, you'd be permitted to join a server with fewer random new users and practically no cheaters (and usually far more skilled players). No need for intrusive anti-cheat solutions (that IME just gave legit users trouble and still failed to stop cheaters).
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
We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise.
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)
> We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise.
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.
I understand you really believe everything you’re saying; unfortunately I can’t help but read it as painfully naive.
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 understand you really believe everything you’re saying; unfortunately I can’t help but read it as painfully naive.
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.
> 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.
Thanks for the post. It was very interesting, however, I honestly do not see it addressing my question. Most of the problems he mentions are due to client-side trust issues.
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".
I wish you to play a competitive multiplayer game filled with cheaters.
You don't know if your opponent is good or cheating.
It simply kill all the fun.
If it won't work on PC, multiplayer gaming will simply moves to consoles.
Great, now you are stuck with a closed standard, with a closed OS, where you can't run the programs you want.
I have. Many times. Yes, its a bit of a bummer. No, it still doesn't justify Tencent being able to see more about what is going on in my machine better than I can.
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.
Wild how this turned from "I don't want a game-related kernel-level driver in my system" to "I don't want China spying on me" in one reply. 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.
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.
> Wild how this turned from "I don't want a game-related kernel-level driver in my system" to "I don't want China spying on me" in one reply.
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?
> 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?
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.
> 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
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
Usually it's studio; but it's a bit give and take in that regard.
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.
> If you’ll sign an NDA I can show you TC anticheat and EasyAnticheat.
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s only “a bit of a bummer” when you experience it once every dozen games or less. If it occurs every other game, it starts to become a bad time investment to even start the game and try to get in a match.
Why does it matter if you built the computer with your own hands? It's sad that we need invasive anticheat but if that's what it takes to get a somewhat cheater free gaming environment I am ok with that. I'll take that over ruined games by cheaters any day of the week.
Until some overly agressive anti-cheat that has kernel level access, decides to blacklist your machine, and because of whatever black boxed bugs, blocks your machine's Ethernet connections, all of them, and now you're stuck until you reimage and remove that borked kernel, except that they implemented an IME level code chunk that immediately downloads the anti-cheat code on the IME channel, and now your machine can never connect to the internet again until you replace the motherboard.
It sounds like you know more about how these work than I do so I'll assume it can happen. It's a risk to consider for sure. I obviously don't want this to happen to me, but I'll still take this major inconvenience that a few individuals might suffer from over cheaters in game that everyone playing the game suffers from. I'm talking cheating in multiplayer games to be clear.
I guess I'll get downvoted again, but I'll take those downvotes in stride.
First, anti-cheat software doesn't guarantee anything of the sort. There are still plenty of cheats out there.
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.
> First, anti-cheat software doesn't guarantee anything of the sort. There are still plenty of cheats out there.
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.
> It's about raising the bar to be difficult enough for enough people to not bother.
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.
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.
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.
most regular players want MMR and matchmaking so they can play against similarly-skilled teams and can see themselves improve by winning against better opponents over time. They don’t want to have to weed through a lobby list to maybe get into an evenly-matched game, or maybe get destroyed by someone leagues better than them.
So letting people run their own servers where the kernel doesn't need to be compromised for all the players will have minimal impact. Gotcha. So we agree, let them run their own servers and the minority who are security conscious can game away happily.
> Great, now you are stuck with a closed standard, with a closed OS, where you can't run the programs you want.
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.
What DRM anticheat measures do is to monitor your whole system for modifications and kill the app if they detect changes. For example, they will make sure that your nVidia (or AMD) driver is one of the whitelisted hashes and hasn't been modified with a wallhack.
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.
Evergreen, but the incentive/enforcement structures for this in games are often very wrong.
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?
Stream gaming is inherently safe from cheating too, because the game logic and rendering is not computed directly by the player so there's no way they can 'cheat' in a conventional sense.
But it does eliminate whole classes of cheats like ESPs and wallhacks. It also allows for servers to trust the clients. There's no issue with letting a client determine if they've killed someone instead of needing on the server to rollback and check for kills.
Maybe check out some existing ones before confidently making such a claim? E.g. https://github.com/petercunha/Pine. IIRC there are even high quality image recognition-based aimbots for sale; can’t find them right now.
And when we get to the point that those are available to anyone with $40 and a credit card they'll be handled. Until then they're a theoretical attack for all intents and purposes.
This has been a thing since day 1 of Overwatch at the very least. Most aimbots being used didn't touch the executable or memory at all, they were called 'color bots' because all they had to do was match pixel color values. They were basic enough a concept you could build them in AutoIT macro software along with ramp up and down features so you weren't just instantly spamming headshots, but instead incrememently your aim would get better. They became so sophisticated that you could be sat behind someone physically using one and not be sure they were cheating or not.
I agree with this. In my professional past I always pushed back on kernel modules unless everyone on the project agreed that once installed this was no longer Linux but rather a proprietary appliance and the 3rd party is now responsible for the uptime and security of the server. The DevOps and operations teams are entirely off the hook for supporting that appliance. I won most battles, lost a few. There was always some vendor trying to sell a SSD card that required a kernel module instead of just presenting itself as a generic SAS devices really a really high queue depth.
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.
Honestly, I'm neutral about kernel level anticheat. I won't play any of those games, but this doesn't mean we should make porting games that make use of these technologies any harder.
Being opensource doesn't imply the game server will allow modified builds to work. Being able to see the code doesn't mean you will find a suitable way to circumvent the anticheat.
That being said, I agree it would be harder to maintain an open source anticheat effectively.
How would hardware attest to the game server that the player cannot see through walls, and that their aim is not nudged (subtly or overtly) in the direction of enemy faces? Keeping in mind that the cheater has full control over the software running on their computer, so they can decide what to send to the server. Also the cheater doesn't need to alter the game itself, they could access the game memory and implement their aimbot by having a clever mouse-driver.
I think it's a choice with lots of positives and negatives tradeoffs on both sides (in-kernel anti-cheat vs userland anti-cheat), where any choice is not gonna make everyone happy.
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.
Very interesting to see this criticism in a topic about Valve, who don't go there with VAC, and are often criticized for not going the kernel level anti-cheat route (by a chunk of the playerbase that thinks it will solve cheating).
They even backpedaled when people found out that they were analyzing your DNS cache on Windows to search for known cheat provider websites.[0]
You should not need to reverse engineer a piece of software for it to not spy on your network activity. Either way, it's not clear whether resolving cheatsite.com is that well-correlated with cheating. There's a reason why this is called Hacker News.
That's another topic, but that's kind of my point: Valve weren't doing anything akin to kernel-level shenanigans, and even without that, some of the stuff they did already backfired because of privacy concerns.
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).
With all the machine learning we have, game makers could train models to spot hackers. The hacking patterns were obvious even during counter strike 1.6 days. Maybe they got more subtle?
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.
As far as I'm aware Valve does use ML (called VACnet) to detect cheaters. At the time of the GDC talk[0] it was only implemented for CSGO but it could've expanded since then
I’m opposed to kernel drivers/root kits too, but I wouldn’t install this on my daily driver. I’d have a separate partition with a fresh Linux install. So I don’t personally have a problem with it as I’d just treat it as a gaming system that I consider compromised. I wouldn’t do any banking or browsing on it
This seems like a real benefit to Linux. Just installing it on a new partition would be a tricky proposition on Windows. In Linux it is the obvious solution. As an added bonus, you could look into doing some of the latency tuning stuff and not have to worry about messing up your work partition.
I've always wondered if just having a really strong matchmaking system would be enough. It would keep cheaters playing against cheaters. Pro players in theory shouldn't be as good as cheaters, so they'd be in their own rank. But I suppose cheaters could purposefully play poorly sometimes to keep their ranking down. Is that even worth it to cheaters?
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.
You already figure it out from the pro side, but it sadly is not enough on the casual side as well. The issue is streamers would show their audience how easy it is to cheat and this would lead to a perception by more casual gamers that cheating is rampant and so they would be less inclined to join. This reduces the audience, hitting worse match making (as you suggest), lower stream viewership, less game success for the studio, etc.
As a pretty bad FPS player (was ok on consoles but never got the knack for aiming with a mouse in the same way), matchmaking works well enough for me. My better friends are always complaining about hackers, but I almost never encounter them.
It's not like video card companies don't have black boxes in the kernel. Maybe nVidia will make an anti-cheat API and then it's gonna be a choice between "have a 3d accelerator at all" and "clean kernel."
Which is why people who care about stuff like this use an AMD GPU, whose driver is open sourced and mainlined in the kernel.
This is not perfect since there are still BLOBs, but it does help a lot.
Competitive gaming is a thing. For those cases, Valve can distribute a linux gaming OS with anti-cheat mechanisms. Then restrict competitive participation to that OS.
Completely agree. My computer is my computer and they need to stop trying to own it. I should be able to install and use the software I paid for without some unknown kernel module getting forced into my machine. Proprietary software is bad enough. Nobody cares that they "need" to do it, that's a line they can't cross and if it means their games have cheaters on them so be it.
>I draw a line at supporting kernel level anti-cheat drivers
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.
Are they advocating for that? I thought that, for example, doing a secure boot from a trusted disk image, and consequently not allowing to touch any system-critical components, as well as a good process sandbox model could ensure that cheating is very, very hard, undetectable cheating even more so - and the rootkit-like behavior of anti cheats could be constrained to the sandbox - let's say that the anti cheat software replaces common software libraries with introspectable versions with something like OverlayFS, but since the whole game runs in a Docker container, it cannot affect the rest of your system.
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.
> 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.
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].
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.
People that like to play those games can always dual boot so that kernel-level access doesn't run on the non-gaming OS. It's not ideal, but it allows Linux gaming without compromising your kernel for non-gaming work. Or if you want the option of switching without a reboot you can run another linux instance in a VM, even a VM that uses a logical partition instead of its own image so that you can also boot normally into that partition when you want. Again, not ideal, but if you're committed to Linux then it's still better than being forced into Windows for gaming.
From a gaming perspective, it might be the most "fun" to deliberately choose games that are older and less popular, since then the streamers (those who are also cheaters) aren't really focused on them, since they won't get the views/clicks to see how "good" they are.
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.
> 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.
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?
While I despise this kernel level bs, do you know how it is going to be implemented on Linux?
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.
I fully agree. For me this is one of the main advantages of game streaming and why I think is the future. It is a way to prevent cheating and bad actors that does not require me giving kernel access to game developers. Also protects me from people learning my own IP via poor chat or multiplayer implementations.
Agreed. I don't play these kinds of games so I don't care. However, I do play some more casual games and I would immensely care if an anti-cheat kernel driver were necessary for A. Steam to run or B. Any game to run. At that point steam is dead to me as I don't need steam.
Maybe the compromise is to install the multiplayer module (and anti-cheat drivers) separately. Because coming from the other side of gamers fed up with cheaters, I've heard people wanting to install an anti-cheat which would overclock and kill the GPU of the cheater.
But it should be an option for those that wants to play knowing there are probably fewer cheaters if they opt in.
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.
It's not freedom, its security. DRM is neither here nor there as long as its in user-space. It sucks for the consumer, but I understand why companies do it even if I don't like it.
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".
> 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
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.
The problem is it's not just kids using public cheats. There are private cheats that really damage the integrity of competitive gaming. Counter Strike Global Offensive is a good example of this.
> and I refuse to knowingly install a game that features one
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.
I’m not sure I understand peoples objections to the existence of anti-cheat software. As far as I can tell, as long as we don’t play these games, it doesn’t affect us at all right? I can’t play Valorant on Linux today because the developer won’t offer it. Even if they started offering it tomorrow then with a Linux anti-cheat, it’s existence wouldn’t bother me because I don’t play it.
What’s the issue here, really? Who’s being affected by a game they don’t play and don’t want to play?
Proton is absolutely amazing. I've started buying a few more indy titles to play a little bit, and they tend to "just work" most of the time now (which definitely didn't used to be the case).
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).
And damn Valve for not supporting a 64 bit Linux Steam client. Having to mess with installing 32bit OpenGL drivers just for Valve, sometimes messing up the installation left a bad taste.
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.
> I'm sure many would happily drop 32bit games support for that.
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.
Yes really, I have no interest in playing 32bit games on Linux, and Valve could make it blatantly obvious that a 64bit client cannot play 32bit games. So if Valve is really concerned, just make the 32bit client download primary and have the 64bit download behind some EULA that explains that it only supports 64bit games.
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.
So you expect Valve to prioritize a client that will only be usable for a minority of a minority (Linux users that understand what 32-bit and 64-bit are and are OK with excluding games based on an arbitrary 64-bit only restriction) while there is no pressing need for it since you can run 32-bit Steam on pretty much any distribution after installing a couple of extra packages?
I am very excited by the Steam Deck and have paid for my place in the queue (hopefully some time this year). I am a long time desktop Linux user, however I also game and have either had to dual boot, or more recently, game inside a Windows VM because of DRM and unsupported games.
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'm not arguing that people wont buy the console, I'm arguing that if they buy a console that has support for a different operating system, one which plays all of the same games and more, and also enables them to use services that they already pay for, then they're going to install that other operating system.
A relatively small number of people are buying the steam deck to use Linux, most are buying it to play games on.
I don't think the majority of steam deck users will bother installing windows on it. But it'll very much depend on the state of SteamOS 3.0 and proton.
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.
First people complain that no one will use Linux because theirs no hardware. Then they complain they can’t use Linux because of the software support. We now have both and now people won’t use Linux because Microsoft acquired studio’s games will only run on Windows? That moving goal post doesn’t look good for the Switch or PlayStation platforms then.
I've used Linux as my daily driver for near enough 20 years at this point. I'm not arguing that people wont use Linux because Microsoft have bought some studios, I'm arguing that they might not use Linux on a device designed specifically for gaming if they can't play games using services that they've already paid for.
I mean, there are a lot of reasons not to use Linux still, just because Valve solved a few of them doesn't make any of the others illegitimate. I mean, christ, the desktop user experience is still pretty goddamned terrible, and the only reason I'm personally considering switching in the near future is that Microsoft is working hard to make Windows even worse.
Plasma has given me everything I could need. For 80% of people that’s going to be a web browser. Outside of that I had no problems migrating my work flows to Linux native apps. There are plenty.
> For 80% of people that’s going to be a web browser.
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.
Because it’s a point for general usability arguments for the mass public. It’s a feather in the cap of ChromeOS which is a variant of Gentoo, so why can’t it be that for other Linux OSes. Linux software already provides anything outside of a browser…does that need to be touted a long side of it also?
The desktop user experience suck on all platforms. Macos is ridden with bugs and inflexibility, Windows is just confusing to me, and Linux depends on which of the hundreds of experiences you pick.
I game on Windows, work on Mac. Used fedora daily through uni and before.
I don't disagree, especially nowadays, but for decades Windows and MacOS have had clearly superior desktop experiences. That's only changed relatively recently and it had a lot less to do with improvements on the Linux side than it did with the commercial OSs getting much worse.
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.
Claiming <year> will be the year of the Linux desktop has become a running joke among me and my friends.
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.
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.
Valve is probably only able to do all this stuff BECAUSE it is private. Public companies are concerned more with what pushes up numbers for 1 quarter and keeps shareholders happy than anything else.
As long as Valve remains a private company I will trust them to do a good job over pretty much every other gaming-related company. Publicly traded companies are just fundamentally unable to be anything other than pure-profit driven, while the reverse is not true for private companies. Still profit driven, but not forced to have that sole focus.
Well that and literally owning the money printing machine known as Steam (a gaming marketplace where you can not only buy games, but sell skins, avatars, and other pictures for your profile; Valve takes their cut in every transaction).
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Valve generates multiple billions+ in revenue annually.
Right. And if it was publicly traded, the share price would quickly rise to a point where anything less then 10x those billions would make the stock a bad investment, forcing late-buyers to push leadership into making that 10x real. Rinse and repeat.
I'd argue being private is the only reason Valve has accomplished what it has accomplished. If they had to answer to non-gamer shareholders, they'd have not done a lot of things that have made gamers happy, but looked risky initially.
Valve has also played a major role in normalizing DRM, microtransactions and lootboxes. They definitely do have the capacity for shady shit even if they are "better" than some of the competition.
Well, technically speaking we don't know if there are any outside investors. We only know Newell still holds most of the stock and controls it, and that significant chunks are owned by past and current employees.
It hasn't been tough since they made Steam. In fact, the biggest productivity issue at Valve seems to be exactly due to the fact that they don't _really_ need to do anything beyond maintaining Steam as the primary intermediary for computer games.
Yes, and now we are living in a reality where Steam has taken over ~all meaningful, non-niche digital PC games distribution. They got into a monopolistic position during a small time window of inflection where the market was transitioning from physical to digital distribution. It's meaningless to talk about the past in these circumstances, unless something truly drastic happens to open another such window to let someone displace 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.
You’ve flown far beyond the original comment’s context, which was Valve’s entire history from way before there was Steam. I don’t know whose point you think you’re responding to.
Obviously. The point was that earnings from half-life were effectively the stand-in for investor capital. And I'd wager that even with all that money, or ten times as much, Steam would not have been able to establish itself without hl2 as a tool/vector. It's been almost two decades that we haven't seen a single steam copycat that did not try to ride a flagship game release in exactly the same way (unless you consider GoG or humble as steam copycats, or Playstore and whatever itms is called these days)
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.
It already is thousands but the games just need to go through Valve hardware vetting. AppDB (WINE) and ProtonDB will give a better picture at what’s possible.
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.
And how do you get to a big enough market share to become a default compilation target? I'd argue that Wine/Proton are a bridge to that.
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.
I totally agree, I'm just debunking the year of the Linux Desktop hype. This has been sad so many times, and still not happening. Just as it's not happening this year.
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.
> And how do you get to a big enough market share to become a default compilation target?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Ok, fair, I've altered the wording. I may have reflexively lumped you in with the kind of Linux Evangelist who likes to claim that "Linux is good enough for everyone" and actively dismisses any use case that contradicts that.
As a game dev it surprises me the constant push from some Linux players to still make a native Linux version, considering how good Valve's Proton layer is. I don't think they understand that while making a new Linux build can be trivial (in Unity), dealing with all the support issues for that isn't. I don't have time to track down audio issues for some random Linux version for 0.001% of players
Yet if I say I'll only support Proton on Linux I am inviting myself to constant hate mail
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.
Good thing it's the third paragraph of the link provided then.
> 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!
In my anecdotal experience with my game, I've gotten one Linux-specific problem on my end (video-related) and quite a few bugs that affected everyone but were reported by a Linux player.
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.
For another perspective, I don't think I've ever gotten actual hate mail for the game only working through Proton. Most people just go "oh, OK, cool". I usually explain why proper Linux support is hard for a small studio like mine.
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.
They are small subset of players because there are no wide support for gaming on Linux. If this change by game developers then this percentage will increase dramatically.
There's no wide support for gaming on Linux Desktop because historically there hasn't been anything one could call "The Linux Desktop" for them to target. The landscape is so ludicrously fragmented that you can't rely on any software to be installed other than the kernel. Valve got around this by just packing their own runtime libraries with Steam.
For desktop Linux you can rely on glibc, OpenGL, Vulkan, X11 (even with Wayland) and OSS/ALSA/Pulse() being present. That is really all you need* to run a game and there are plenty of libraries that you can ship with your game if you want their functionality, statically linking them when possible. This approach has been shown to work since 1999.
(*) 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.
Staia presented a known system to target, not a fragmented mess of ever changing 'distributions' that don't even attempt to maintain binary compatibility for a single release.
Distributions do maintain binary compatiblity for base system libraries. They do not bother with binary compatibility for additional libraries that are there to support the applications shipped with the distro. You wanting those libraries to be part of the Linux desktop ABI does not mean that there is no stable Linux desktop ABI.
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.
I'm someone who still mostly avoids non-native games but I don't send hate mail and most likely will just ignore your game so you won't hear from users like me at all. I don't draw a hard line but there a many reasons why I prefer native games:
* 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
Is it too little, too late? Microsoft now owns a lot of the biggest game franchises through the Activision and Bethesda acquisitions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively block Proton support by using UWP or Windows-specific anticheat.
> and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively block Proton support by using UWP or Windows-specific anticheat
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.
No, they care about maximizing profit as a whole not about any individual franchises. Platform holders have shown again and again that they are willing to sink money into exclusives if it means they can make more money off their platform.
Possible. Although a lot of gaming companies that got bought never did amount to much after the acquisition.
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.
> If Microsoft locks down their environment, I believe they are in danger of losing their dominance on PC.
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.
Microsoft cannot politically afford such brazen anti-competitive moves. Because of accidents of history, their position is somewhat unique. They can close the platform to third-parties if they really want (although I don't think it will ever happen), but actively blocking interop efforts would directly contravene a lot of very well-established legislation.
Didn't even think about that. A part of me wants to think of Xbox as this cool company that wont prevent Linux support. But Microsoft isn't necessarily know for being overly friendly towards Linux huh
If we're strictly comparing Linux and Windows, Linux would have issues with most software (where it only runs in Proton) and the developer of some of the biggest games in the industry (Warcraft, Overwatch, Age of Empires, Wolfenstein, Flight Simulator, Call of Duty, Doom, Halo, Minecraft, Forza etc) is actively hostile or tying their games to Windows/Xbox platform specific features, I think it is a cause for concern.
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.
In a very practical way, I agree with the thought behind the post.
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.
Can you elaborate? Would you prefer the Linux ecosystem to remain less user-friendly, to maintain whatever principles you have in mind? Also, what principles are you referring to?
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.
It isn't clear to me why either of those should be dogmatically stuck to. They're useful for a certain class of software, and actively harmful to others. For games, which are meant to be an integrated experience, they're mostly non-sequiturs.
> I can't really say new programs adhere to either of these principles. In fact, it seems those seem to be actively shunned.
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.
I think the killer feature of the Steam Deck is that it makes Linux gaming desirable. In contrast to their earlier approach with Steam Machines, which made it merely approachable.
At this point, Valve has yet to disappoint me. Even their failures, like the Steam Controller, were amazing pieces of tech. The Steam Deck is no exception. It's exactly what I've been wanting: a SFFPC that doubles as a portable gaming console with Linux natively installed. Bravo Steam!
I still think it's a little odd that there is so much celebration of Linux as a semi-viable game platform, when no one makes native Linux ports anymore; they just target Windows, and then Proton provides a Windows API compatability layer.
Game (and other software) developers like to target stable APIs. Outside of the kernel, Linux has historically been incredibly unstable and fragmented. Vale shipped their own runtime libraries with Steam just to give native Linux game developers something consistent to target. If the Linux Desktop community solved that problem there might be more reason to make native ports.
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?
Yes, if you link random libraries you find in /usr/lib you are going to have a bad time. And you can make things arbitrarily complex if you insist on compiling around the latest hot new distro and then try to hack your way around new symbols but even that is not an issue of fragmentation but an issue of the lack of an official SDK to target older glibc/etc. versions: you can't just target Windows 11 and then expect the .exe to run on XP.
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 .
I share your disappointment over the regression in native support for new titles, but "no one" is an exaggeration that does not do justice to the developers that still put in the effort to release native builds:
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
Agree, Thank you Valve. I play all my games on Arch machine at home. Last few years have been overjoyed with the amount of games that run excellent on my system. To me its a golden time for gaming on Linux!
All well and good and I support Valve's dedication as well. They are doing what everyone else is afraid of doing. Kudos!
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.
The only thing I miss on GNU/Linux is a good alternative to CheatEngine, with popular game scripts from FearlessRevolution.org - creative use of such scripts can tremendously improve (single-player) gaming experience.
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.
its worth noting valves monumental effort was largely inspired by the release of the Microsoft store, which at the time (had it succeeded) would have had a significant impact on Valve. Valves support for Linux was a massive strategic success that almost certainly led Redmond to focus more attention on the cloud presence that runs online games and publishing services, instead of directly trying to EEE the playing field.
I'll be happy when I can finally delete my Windows partition, which is used exclusively to play games.
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.
I'm fine with people praising Valve for utilising linux to advance their commercial interests. It's an example of a "win win" situation.
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.
I think so far Valve's interest seem much more aligned with the average Linux gamer than any other company that I can think of. Valve has become a significant contributor to, the primary maintainer or themselves started development of:
* 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.
I think they started using their proton layer for dota2. I am lately experiencing lags during their heavy animations when presenting Arcana and special game modes, other than that it works fine. I have a lot of games since I buy 3 year old games for 5 dollars and most of them work fine. The newest games with special anti cheat systems probably do not work.
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.
Recently it switched to running via Proton if you had Steam Play enabled (and broke completely for me). Solution is/was to disable Steam Play and it will use native version.
Hm, that's surprising to me. It's historically been that you have to enable Steam Play for a specific title to switch that one title over to using the Windows version via Proton. Possibly that changed so the global setting does it as well, but it would surprise me.
This is great but I still dislike that valve has no customer support whatsoever. They also offer no refunds for errors in their system. I've been in situations where I purchase something off the market and it says "could not find an item at that price" and purchases it anyway without updating the screen. This resulted in me having multiple of the same item and they wouldn't even acknowledge the issue. I'm anti steam until they fix their huge customer service black hole. There's no excuse.
I have refunded a number of items on steam for a number of reasons and all it took was filling out some online forms and waiting a bit. While I never spoke to a person I never had an issue. Steam also has a posted refund policy: https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/
I’ve had a couple issues with steam purchases over the years, but support always corrected it right away and were helpful and friendly; even in the case where the issue was clearly my fault.
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.
As a consumer, Valve comes across like Google. They build products and features and then they often sit untouched, sometimes for years. They are terrible at communicating to their playerbase and even their contracted talent.
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.
Yeah and I don't see the comparison with Google either. Valve isn't known for killing profitable products. Steam Machines was just an experiment which came a few years too soon, the technology wasn't there yet, thus Proton and now the actual Steam Machines are a reality.
I hope Valve brings something like they have done for Linux to macOS.
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.
Apple dropped 32 bit support, it was intentional. They’re not going back on it. They have a long history of showing no interest in software preservation.
Valve has the technology. Wine runs on macOS. Just need to apply it to Steam for Mac.
I think you're missing the spirit of the question. If Apple doesn't want to wreck gaming on its platform, and if there are few gamers on Apple platforms, and supporting Apple platforms doesn't give Valve the upper hand against MS the same way supporting Linux would... Why would Valve bother? Why shouldn't it be on Apple to make it work?
Maybe install Crossover and play the Windows versions of games through there?
I think you miss Valves motives entirely. They want to sell games.
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.
Obviously their motive is to sell games, but their priorities likely don't currently include Apple's hardware as a result of wanting to compete in the console market and wanting to twist away Microsoft's near-monopoly on PC. Not everyone is a Linux user, but there are lots of people who would be willing to use it if it was sufficiently packaged. The Steam Deck is likely to be exactly that.
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).
That's a decent reason to have Steam on Mac, which they do. But I don't see the incentive to build proton for Mac, which would just move them from one potential walled garden into another one.
According to some gamedev friends, Apple is the single worst platform they support (at least for anything that isn't Apple-only).
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.)
I noticed this the other day too-- a couple friends and I were looking through our Steam library to see what we could play together and it turns out that I, the linux user, could play more games than the MacOS users.
I've been gaming happily on Linux for years. Top and/or good games like Dying Light, ARK. The rest I played using Wine with tweaks. Proton is great and Valve should be applauded but the future of gaming on Linux or Linux Desktop in general doesn't rest now on any one company and it never has.
Big thanks to DXVK at this point. Even when you are not running on Linux directly, having a DX11 -> Vulkan translation layer makes porting (older) games to other platforms so much easier.
Of course, there are also other projects like FAudio that do an awesome job!
Firefox uses Google's "Safe Browsing" list for these warnings. As someone with a website I can tell you that Google gives exactly zero shits about removing false positives from that list and keeping them off. With the rise of barely verified machine learning algorithms used to feed the list you can expect this to become a more common occurence for independent sites. My personal suggesion is to disable the feature in your browser instead of letting a private corporation with no transparency or accountability gatekeep what you should consider safe.
I commend you for putting your money here your mouth is :)
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.
Keep in mind valve is a business first. There interest is profitability. Its just that the direction of their interest happens to align with Linux. This is good, but if at some point in time it doesn't align, don't be surprised.
