“Sir, a significant market segment says we’re ignoring them.”
“Are they still giving us money?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then fuck 'em.”
“In which hole sir”
Nearly 800 hours in Scum, now I can’t play it anymore because it’s missing Linux EAC support. Too bad.
I mean if the game you paid money for is deliberately broken to shaft you, you are a clown for reviewing the game positively. Judging by the complaints of every game with linux-breaking anti cheat, it has failed to remove any of the cheaters.
SiGnIfIcAnT sEgMeNt
inb4 all of the “significant segment” gives me a total of 27 downvotes - I am a full time Linux enjoyer on all my personal computers. Including but not limited to all of my gaming purposes. And I’d love for more game devs to release Linux native builds.
I just don’t have illusions about being in any kind of target audience for larger game devs.
There’s that “I never vote because politicians do not care about the issues of people like me anyway” attitude again.
(Hint: They don’t care because your kind won’t vote anyway.)
I always vote.
But when I vote for a minority favourite, I don’t go around saying that all other parties ignore a “significant portion” of voters.
As for games, I also always vote with my money.
Oftentimes I buy games (and not even play them) just because they have a linux native release. But I still don’t think linux gamers are a “significant portion” of gamers.
So stop with these kind of baseless accusations, where you conjure up a non existing correlation from your ass.
Good point!
That’s also a symptom of first-past-the-post only giving people 2 realistic options when we should really have more under mixed member proportional.
as much as I love not running windows on my machines, this is 100% pure copium
also this post sounds really petty and it’s really sad if this is what the broader Linux gaming community really thinks, can they seriously not just ignore AAA games given how shit they are?
It’s not petty to use your voice to vocalize your displeasure. The squeaky door gets the grease.
The steamdeck runs on Arch. Games with windows-only anticheat excludes millions of potential players.
We actually know this number. As per Steam’s hardware survey this group is around 2%, including Steam Deck players.
Best guess, Steam Deck sales are 5-10% of the Switch, which is in the same ballpark, so both numbers are probably roughly right.
Wheter you want to count that as “significant” is up to you, I guess. I bet the impact is very different depending on the game, even for supported games.
When it comes to large corporations, they’re very risk adverse but will ruthlessly pursue every stray penny. It always bubbles up from the indie companies, so expect native Linux support for specifically steamOS so they don’t have to contend with the GPL and FOSS advocates by 2030.
Nah, it’s always a cost/benefit analysis. If anything, many of them tend to be very shortsighted about fuzzy reputational impacts they can’t easily measure in dollars.
2% of users (and less of that in revenue, I bet, since some segment of Deck players will bite the bullet and play on Windows desktop anyway) may be worth salvaging…
…but only if it doesn’t cost you more than 2% in terms of additional dev cost or in terms of losing you players due to having worse security.
That math is debatable, but I guarantee it’s very likely how many of these decisions are getting made. Review bombing may or may not help there.
Negative reviews would increase the pressure. Every drop makes an ocean.
It does, but it depends on how many and how they emerge. If it’s a review bombing campaign it’s more likely to get moderated out or ignored. If it’s an organic thing it’s more likely to be perceived as a genuine PR problem. And in any case it depends on how many people are actually complaining. 2% can be a lot of people if the overall number is big, but if the game in question has a serious bug that’s a lot more people willing to write about it than… you know, whatever percentage of 2% happens to be Linux-focused enough to go write a review.
I guess I’m trying to impress that a lot of people play games and of those a fraction get activist and of those a fraction play on Deck or Linux desktop and of those a fraction are going to complain.
The best path to solving this is less a review bombing campaign and more having a larger audience that is just obviously profitable to support. That one is mostly on Valve, Lenovo and the rest of the official SteamOS adopters, whoever they end up being.
Well, and on finding a reliable solution for proper anticheat on Linux that keeps it as secure as at least Windows, let alone consoles.
Correct, the reason I gave a 5 year window is because the investment into Linux support is tiny right now so they don’t accidentally cut into the quarterlies.
Hah. You may have accidentally come up with the new “this is the year of Linux Desktop”.
“Five years from now is the year of Linux gaming being financially relevant short-term” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though.
Honestly, I don’t have any predictions on this. So much is riding on how hard Valve is willing to invest on becoming a OS company and how receptive end users are to it. Right now the outcome falls somewhere between “Steam Machines” and “Nintendo Switch”, and I genuinely don’t think anybody can predict where in between it will fall yet. At the very least we need to see what happens to the Legion Go S and SteamOS adoption.
I’m speaking with industry knowledge on the state of gaming. It’s coming.
There are 3.2 billion video gamers in the world, and 1.17 billion play online (numbers are from 2023).
“millions” is a couple percent. (As seen in the steam survey as well as napkin mathing the numbers from above)
Call of Duty is the biggest fps game in the world, every year. Their playerbase is “only” in the millions, so I suppose you agree with the executives that it’s not nearly successful enough?
No, because they are above the average video games market share.
But you can’t argue that Linux gamers are a significant market share, just because the number in front of the % is the same lol.
There are millions of video games, which all have below 1% market share. Compared to the average game, a single percent is huge.
But there are no millions of operating systems with below 1% market share. Compared to the most popular OS, which has above 80% market share, 1 or 2 percent is insignificant.
Ok so if you agree that their playerbase of millions marks a successful game, then why do you consider the possibility of millions of players insignificant?
It’s not absolute but relative.
Because for each individual game dev, linux gamers account for on average 2% of their sales, which is insignificant.
Linux gamers are spread across all of the games and game devs.
Every person excluded from a purchase is money lost in the eyes of corporations. It’s why boycotts work when they’re properly organized. It’s why microtransactions are usually less than $5. I’ve been in corporate meetings for game companies before, I was recently illegally fired. The addition of Linux support is coming, but the big corporations need motivation to do it quickly.
We need the game publishers to face more consequences for shoving BS kernel level anti-cheats and not focusing on where it actually matters, server-side.
(Which would also solve the Linux AC problem by extension)
how do you actually tell in server side if a client is e.g. actually good at a game vs playing recorded moves with a bit of randomisation when you don’t have access to into on what’s actually happening on the client device?
as much as I love Linux this sounds like purposeful partial blindness from hopium/copium
You’ll never catch all cheaters no matter what you do. All the kernel access in the world won’t stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.
A solid robust server-side solution and well architected server-client system will stop 99% of cheating. And no, Kernel AC is not part of a “well architected” system.
It’s, at best, a bandaid for a shitty server-client system that introduces a shit ton of privacy and security issues for everyone that uses it. Shit needs to stay out of the kernel unless absolutely necessary, and that goes for Linux, Windows or MacOS kernels.
Almost every blue screen/Kernel panic I’ve dealt with was traced back to some shit hooking itself into the kernel where it didn’t belong. And absolutely fuck third-party antivirus that hooks into the kernel too.
All the kernel access in the world won’t stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.
I guess that’s true, but that’d be a lot difficult to program and expensive to use compared to a simple program that can read data straight from the game’s memory in machine readable format and send inputs straight into the system’s input framework. by raising the entry bar you’re effectively decreasing the amount of people that will cheat in the game
it’s ultimately the user’s decision if they want to sacrifice the purity of their kernel for a game like this, and I think it’s their problem if their kernel panics for them wanting to play slop made by AAA studios
In addition to what @[email protected] covered on the first part of your response
it’s ultimately the user’s decision if they want to sacrifice the purity of their kernel for a game like this, and I think it’s their problem if their kernel panics for them wanting to play slop made by AAA studios
That’s absolute horseshit, the average gaming consumer doesn’t know shit about the kernel, what it even is or the implications of running Kernel AC. They might know their game has AC, but chances are they won’t even know what kind to make this kind of informed decision.
This is becoming less true for FPS every month - the described method of cheating (off-device reading and input simulation) is becoming more accessible as more cheat makers are selling premade devices that do this. Huge problem even for new shooters like rivals - someone was already caught doing it in one of their ingame tournaments. It’s the primary way people cheat in League of Legends, and it would not surprise me to see evidence of it in dota 2(though I haven’t personally, I haven’t been paying attention to it for some years and it isn’t as frequent that a variety streamer or youtuber plays it compared to lol).
As mentioned before, kernel anticheat won’t catch these guys anyway, so it’s largely just a way to alienate your user base. There’s a new problem it does nothing special to solve.
I mean DMA (direct memory access) devices are only like 170 bucks now:
https://www.dma-cheats.com/dma-cards
These are almost impossible to do anything about even client-side because they operate on a hardware level.
In general state-reading hacks (like invisible walls and Gameworld state information hacks) are almost impossible to do anything about, to the point where when companies are able to find a way to defeat one of these things it’s huge news.
One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user’s input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there’s some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).
Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn’t be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can’t see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?
Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it’s a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won’t catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton’s f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it’s even more sensitive to sample rate.
Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.
That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.
I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).
Game publishers: but server-side anticheat is
more expensiveHARDDDDDDMost games I know about do both, but my understanding is it’s hard to stop some of the client-side stuff server-side.
Look, we’ve been here before. I’m not super invested in multiplayer stuff, so I don’t care that much, but I am old enough to remember when gamedevs would not even try crossplay and just let the PC be the wild west when it comes to cheating.
I didn’t necessarily hate it. I lived in a world of dedicated servers where moderation and security came down to some kid in his underpants being pretty sure he didn’t like you and kicking you out. I’m guessing there’s a bit too much money and too much of an expectation of free-form matchmaking for the mass market to go back to that.
But hey, I’m not a security software engineer and I’m not excessively involved in competitive shooters, which seems to be where most of the problem happens. My interest in this is having enough PC security for crossplay to make matchmaking in fighting games less of a hassle than it used to be in the Street Fighter 4 days. You sweaty FPS nerds can do whatever, as far as I’m concerned.
You’re right on all accounts, I oversimplified for humor. Server-side IS more expensive and does exist in limited ways. Rolling matches on dedi servers are highly profitable, unfortunately the old school days of matchmaking are over for everything except indie companies that want to replicate the nostalgia
No. It’s a video game. Publishers have no business being in my kernel.
Anticheats on Linux don’t have kernel access… Have you ever heard of people needing to type their root password to launch a steam game before?
Anticheats on Linux don’t have kernel access
Yeah, I know. I’d like it to stay that way. Furthermore, this is also why games with kernel-level anticheat still don’t work on linux, despite developments in wine/proton.
Don’t give corpos any ideas
Hu? You don’t need to type root password to load a kernel module automatically , do you?
I mean, do you have to type the root pw if you plug in a wifi dongle that requires an out-of-tree module?
As far as I understand, you have to type root pw only for installation and update of the module and, depending on distribution, even that is not really visible since you type root pw to install tons of stuff all the time.
Where did I say I wanted kernel anti-cheat?
The post is about anticheat that doesn’t work on linux. Non-kernel-level anticheat works fine now thanks to wine/proton. That just leaves kernel-level anticheat. If a game has kernel-level anticheat, the studio is not going to remove it for the sake of a linux version. Therefore, to be compatible with linux, they would be introducing kernel-level anticheat into a linux version. To this, I say “fuck no”.
It’s implied, because anything would behave the same.
Not that client-side anti-cheat makes any sense anyway.
Well i didn’t imply that.
anti cheat with kernel privilege access? No, thanks
Nope, fuck that. I’m not running that anti cheat shit on my machines, I just won’t buy it.
Bro. That’s not what is happening or being talked about. Most anticheat systems have a Linux flag that can be enabled, letting them run on proton without any sort of kernel access. Everything except Denuvo and fuck that shit in particular.
Denuvo et al are exactly what I’m talking about.
Yea. Well. Fuck those guys.
I’m not calling for kernel anti-cheat. I just want all the multiplayer games to work.
Wanting them to work is reasonable, but complaining about the lack of anti-cheat makes no sense. The problem is the insistence on client-side anti-cheat to begin with.
Kernel seems to be where the publisher interest is currently at…
And here I am, not giving a fuck about competitive online PvP.
Casual games require it too
I dont disagree with this but i don’t know about significant segment, thats kind of delusional
Yeah, I’m Linux-only and have been for the last 17 years, but we are not a significant percentage of the gaming market. Still less than 3% last time I checked.
Otherwise, yeah fuck kernel anticheats that don’t even stop cheating.
There are dozens of us!
Yeah, I also wish they’d have better support, but Linux players are not a huge group.
Steam Deck and Steam machines have helped a lot though. Without Valve’s weight behind it, trying to game on Linux would probably be a lot worse.
I’ll settle for the old Rust approach, where you could still play on (or host your own) servers that didn’t have anti-cheat enabled.
We’ll sooner see linux supported anti cheat than we will server browsers.
unfortunately for us, I don’t think we’re what they would consider “significant”
The steam deck be pretty popular these days.
The only game I currently play is KSP. I’ve grown so tired of all the crap out there.
Every so often I have an urge to come back and play KSP for like a month straight. And it’s a blast every time.
Sometimes a nice single player sandbox is all you need.
I’ve been playing since alpha. I bought it the first day it was on sale. I bought it on steam a second time. When the expansions came out they gave me them on the first purchase. I will do a career run every now and then but most of my games are sandbox games with huge multi launch space stations. I’ve been playing this go round for a about three months and when I get bored I’ll park it on a drive for several months then I’m back at it. I still get a kick out of manual(No Mech Jeb) mun landing and returns.
Is it more stable? I always ended up getting either a kraken or like 2 fps with a giant space station.
KSP 2 is a little better than its first release. I still main play KSP 1 in sandbox mode. If you have a problem with parts counts get a part fusion mod and combine parts to increase your FPS.
Gamers will literally beg corpos to rootkit them.
That’s a slippery slope argument from a post that just says all anti-cheat games should work, I did not say I support kernel anti-cheat.
Not even slippery slope, that guy just manifested an argument out of his ass
Bully for you.
When I eventually make the switch to Linux your efforts will make it even more seamless.
I’m fighting for you!
