Valve Addresses Steam Machine Anti-Cheat Concerns, Says It's Working Towards Support

Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ampersandrew@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/valve-addresses-anti-cheat-steam-machine-concerns-and-is-working-towards-support/

An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important information for a lot of people, especially if you’re looking for an off-ramp from Windows and still want to play some of the most popular live service titles.

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gustofwind@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Irrelevant to me personally but I’d like to see it cause more windows users to jump ship

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- Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  I have no need for Steam products. Gaming emulators have been all I needed for years now. I don’t play the latest games so it’s totally fine for me too.
  
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- missingno@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  TBH, I kinda get the feeling that's what most of the hype surrounding the Machine is. People hoping it sells well, but not necessarily people planning to buy one for themselves.
  
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  - Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    I jokingly told a few redditors that they are doing A LOT of the marketing work for the Steam machine. They didn’t like that at all, lol.
    
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anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
I consider it to be a function of when I grew up with video games and how my family restricted them broadly, but I have honestly never understood the appeal of competitive online games that require intense anti-cheat controls.

I grew up playing largely single player games, and the few online games I payed were limited to ones I played in private lobbies with friends i knew.

Any game that requires this level of policing for competitive play is an instant turn off for me. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I have no problem with a console that doesn’t support kernel level anticheat- to the contrary i find it to be a huge advantage

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨45⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  I get what drove us here. When you find a game that speaks to you and it’s got a ranked mode with good matchmaking, it’s easy to get lost in match after match, and cheaters can take the wind out of your sails. My competitive games of choice are fighting games, which are mostly free of cheaters and this invasive anti-cheat, but I’ll be bummed if it becomes the norm, because I won’t participate in that.
  
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Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It kind of bothers me that people are putting the responsibility on valve for this, when the companies themselves have purposefully not enabled compatibility in most cases.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  They haven’t enabled it because they don’t get the same level of protection on Linux as they do on Windows, so Valve is trying to address that.
  
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circuitfarmer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
On the one hand, I don’t give a fuck about anti-cheat, because games using the kernel-level version tend to be giant multiplayer cesspools of little value.

On the other hand, I want Windows to lose the war.

I hope Valve can find the balance between these two extremes.

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tacosanonymous@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Are they working on giving the worst and most useless companies kernel level access to my pc?

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Perhaps. Of course, if you were able to type that sentence out, it also means you know what to avoid if that’s important to you. I will be, because it’s important to me, too.
  
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Auth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This could be huge. I hope they find a decent middle ground.

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- bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  They’ve worked on anti cheat support before. It still depends on the devs actually activating that support. That will always be the case whatever they do.
  
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Grass@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
I have this feeling that even if valve makes it work, rootkit anticheat devs will push updates that intentionally make it not work again. Probably with more claims like the majority of cheaters being linux users

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- missingno@fedia.io ⁨28⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  If you'd read the article, Valve says they're working with anticheat devs to come up with a solution together. This can only happen with their cooperation, if Valve somehow could bypass it on their own that would represent a vulnerability that should and would get patched.
  
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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨44⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  They’re not just making that up. Cheaters migrated to Linux because it was easier to bypass the anti-cheat protections there. If the anti-cheat is equally effective in both operating systems, they’ll have no reason to cut off a portion of their customer base.
  
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Prove_your_argument@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Still not going to convince some stubborn hold outs like the rust guy. Nothing will ever convince them.

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- Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The market will - and it’d be foolish to underestimate the market forces valve will spark by making viable alternatives mass market.
  
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  - missingno@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I wouldn't expect the Machine to be any more popular than the Deck, which already wasn't enough to convince holdouts. In fact I would bet the Machine will sell much less than the Deck, since that had a more unique niche carved out for it.
    
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  - Prove_your_argument@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    When Linux market share hits 20% it would be a monumental achievement, and developers would probably still avoid it.
    
    Don’t get me wrong, I moved to Linux this year. I want to see it gain traction in the gaming space.
    
    It’s just not likely to happen any time soon. Loads of very basic use cases are a fucking shitshow because of a lot of reasons.
    
    Just getting sunshine setup with a virtual display is a nightmare on Wayland without scripts to enable/disable displays and without being in front of the computer you want to remote to, because the simple logic of “if this display =off, then other display =on” is not a thing.
    
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Codilingus@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If Valve can make wireless vr AND fix windows only anticheat, both next year, I’m going to be 10 different kinds of happy. I would love to basically never need my W11 SSD ever again.

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stsquad@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Modern machines have TPM so we can do attested boot and validate a system hasn’t been tampered with. They don’t need third party kernel modules to test that.

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Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Here’s aiming to be hopeful…

I remember back when playing DRM video in a web browser on an open source operating system seemed like a worrying impossibility. Many sites stayed stuck on closed-source flash players for that reason alone. It was a while before we ended up with this solution I only partly understand - where the DRM decoding is handled through some kind of trusted block, that generally doesn’t have full OS control?

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Do you get full HD video from streaming services these days? Last I checked, the best of them only top out at 720p without Windows.
  
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  - alk@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yeah I get 4k with Firefox on cachyOS
    
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vpol@feddit.uk ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Can they address the price concerns?

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- TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think they want to play this close to the vest because of potentially having to navigate tariffs.
  
  I wonder how much money the Switch 2 lost on release due to tariff fuckery, at least in the US and Canada.
  
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- Zetta@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  They said they aren’t going to announce the price until closer to launch, so just chill. They only announced the product so they could get developers working on game support early.
  
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SpicyTaint@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I don’t imagine the overlap of people interested in the steam machine and people playing games with invasive anti-cheat is very big.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Some of the biggest games on the planet use anti-cheat that just isn’t compatible with SteamOS or any Linux distro, but lots of those people are looking for a way to play the games they enjoy without Windows.
  
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  - Joelk111@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Often it could be compatible, but the developers just don’t bother. The anit-cheat that GTAO implemented works on Linux in other games, but not GTA, because they can’t be bothered to give a fuck.
    
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  - SpicyTaint@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I don’t disagree, but the only a suff that comes to mind is COD or some other EA shovelware.
    
    Ultimately, if it gets more people on Linux, it’s a net positive.
    
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- Goodeye8@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I personally know a few people who are interested in buying the Steam Machine but are having doubts because some their regular games use anticheat that doesn’t work on Linux.
  
  I imagine the amount of people is significantly higher than you might think because the vast majority of gamers don’t care about invasive anticheat. To them Steam machine is the equivalent of a console. They probably don’t even care it runs on Linux because all they care about is being able to play games.
  
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  - baines@lemmy.cafe ⁨50⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    entire box dedicated to avoiding fuckery, gamers beg to install fuckery
    
    stupid mofos
    
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  - Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The majority of gamers buy into the lie that kernel level anti-cheats are more effective, when they really aren’t.
    
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  - Jeffool@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yeah, a lot of gamers know nothing about any of this conversation. I mean, my coworkers who game and mentioned the Stream Machine this weekend. Of course one was talking Fortnite. So that’s where we’re at. I didn’t even get into why this “console” won’t have one of the more popular games that’s literally free on every other machine including their phone. (I can already hear people saying “is a computer! It should run everything!” And then getting together when you explain how, and saying “it should be simple! It’s a console!”) It’s months away at best anyway. Who knows.
    
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zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Oh. That’s smart. Basically if the TPM validates the integrity, cheats cannot be installed/run on a Steam Machine. Let’s hope devs all over the world integrate this Steam Machine exception.

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- Credibly_Human@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  This… doesnt make any sense… For so many reasons.
  
  What exactly do you think a TPM does because it certainly doesnt have the processing power to validate anything. It just stores keys, potentially without you being able to access them (which is a heinous abuse of your autonomy but we live in a dystopia where people just somehow don’t care).
  
  Steam machines aren’t unique in having TPM modules. Most computers do. Even Apple computers have their secure enclave.
  
  Cheats can always be ran on a second pc, and there isn’t a way to thwart this. The ever invasive anti cheat options all trying to avoid writing proper server side validation and fog of war schemes just lose you privacy while not working, but blood thirsty gamers will lose their minds and accept anything if they think it slows down cheaters.
  
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ladicius@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Any idea or hints how Epic will handle this?

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artyom@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This just reads like a bunch of nonsense. What are they actually doing?

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LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
No ground pin? Is that power port DC?

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- Credibly_Human@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  It has the power supply internally so its definitely AC. It almost certainly just uses a galvanically isolated supply which is why it doesnt need a ground.
  
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  - LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨35⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    Neat. Thanks.
    
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- Hawke@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Looks like a standard IEC C8 plug. Image
  
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