Comment by Scramblejams
20 hours ago
Sorry, my writing should have been clearer, I put one too many negatives in. :-)
I didn't claim we should trust the company. Whether we can trust the anticheat maker is certainly part of the rigorous evaluation of the tradeoffs I mentioned. My point was that saying "it doesn't stop cheaters" is both incorrect and stifling to a more productive conversation, because it implies anticheat has no value and is therefore worth no risk.
As for me, if Gabe said "now you can opt your Steam Deck in to a trusted kernel we ship with anticheat and play PUBG," I'd probably do it. But that's because I, for better or worse, tend to trust Gabe. If Tencent were shipping it, I'd probably feel differently.
Compare: "I still get spam, therefore all these anti-spam measures are worthless"
It is absolutely the case that there would be more cheating if we turned off the only partially effective systems. We know this because they are regularly stopping and banning people!
People are going to to be upset when it happens but it is absolutely inevitable at some point Steam ships a Steam Deck with hardware based attestation of the OS being a signed version of SteamOS, feeding back to a Steam API, that can be used as the basis of an anti-cheat solution.