Long story short, if the Steam Machine gains enough market share, game publishers will want to join in because it will mean more money for them. It's all about money.

My solution is simple: if it does not work on Linux, the game is out.

Kernel-level anti-cheat tools aren't even effective at stopping cheaters. They should just drop that dumb bullshit altogether.

Pretty much the answer I'd expect. In my most outlandish hopes, I'd love for this thing to serve as proper competition to the PS5, it's certainly more exciting than Xbox right now, and pretty much sounds like what MS is planning to try for the next Xbox anyway.

That's probably not likely, that kind of threat would require some really aggressive pricing, and Valve can't guarantee as much vendor lock-in money post-sale as Sony can. That said... man it'd be incredible to see Valve step into that near-monopoly as well and viably compete against both Switch and PS5, as they both pretty desperately need competition to keep them working for the consumer.

"We're expecting console numbers this time, and then they developers will have to support it."

There's really nothing new, it's the same as it was on the Steam Deck.

If the devs are not assholes they can easily allow Proton, from what Valve said before often all it takes is literally one checkbox on their side.

Kernel level anything is malware and should not be allowed to be sold.

What kind of shit question is that???

You should be questioning the game developers if they want to implement server side solutions instead of installing rootkits on users PCs and dictating what settings they should use.

Fuck off Eurogamer. No game should require any sort of kernel level access or setting change on your PC.

It's just a skill issue on the part of the developers.

Making anti-cheat properly is hard. Writing a spyware that watches everything that happens on your PC and blocks any attempts of touching the game is way easier, but bypassing that is easy with solutions that have higher privledges, thus being invisible even for the anti-cheat. You can just fake calls or hide memory from the anti-cheat, or just edit the anti-cheat in itself.

The solution for that is to run anti-cheat in the highest possible permission - the kernel.

Now, you could just make another kernel-level program that would have the same permissions to defeat that, or just edit your OS (i.e Linux, or a VM) where your cheat lives outside and has even higher privileges than the anti-cheat.

This is where Windows comes in - the only way to run kernel code is to have it signed by Microsoft, and that certification process is extremely difficult and annoying, which puts a pretty big hurdle in front of cheat developers. It's the easy way out.

You could also somehow reverse-engineer Windows and run a custom version to bypass this. And that's where TPM comes in, which (if I understood it right) validates that your Windows is the official signed one, and thus the kernel anti-cheat is safe. You can't have this kind of affirmation on Linux, and the lazy developers who don't want to invest into actual moderation and proper anti-cheat solutions just resort to kernel anti-cheat rootkit and require TPM to be enabled.

There's not much Steam can do about this, aside from locking up their OS with signign keys and certification for priviliged software, along with setting up the whole TPM so you can't run modified versions, which isn't really possible since they are based on Linux.

Perhaps the issue is, partially, structural?

I know some games are super competitive, but what if we generally went back to user hosted (and moderated) lobbies? They clean their own house. Some cheaters would get through, sure, but I feel like there's more social pressure not to cheat among a group of friends vs. raging strangers.

"Kernel-level anti-cheat" is just a PR term for malware, change my mind.

I remember buying a Steam Link directly from Valve back in the day for like $7 because of some sale they had. I really hope the same thing doesn't happen to the new Steam Machine

I think it would have to be wildly successful to achieve that goal but 🤞🤞