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Comment by ethmarks

3 months ago

I think that the idea is that if you get enough users on Linux, it seems foolish from the game studio's perspective not to add Linux support to their anticheat.

Not necessarily, the anticheat will end up much easier to defeat on Linux.

  • It's possible that 'adding Linux support' would take the form of just making the anticheat optional.

    Maybe playing with the anticheat enabled makes you immune to being reported for cheating (because they can verify down to the kernel level that you aren't), but you can still play without it (but without the immunity from being reported).

    Obviously they wouldn't do this in today's market because there's no incentive to do so, but if a significant portion of gamers moved to Linux, offering a Linux solution might become a reasonable choice for game studios.

    • Optional anti-cheat could be really interesting. Make it a matchmaking option; let the players decide who they want to play with. This effectively makes "PC without Anti-cheat" a new platform in cross-platform match making.

      I can imagine a whole scene popping up where everyone cheats to the max, creating whole new game modes.

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  • This depends heavily on how customised the linux is. Back in the day Amazon had to fork Android to add kernel-level support for DRM, otherwise the studios weren't going to permit streaming video on Fire tablets. One could imagine Valve adding an optional kernel DRM module to solve the same problem.

    • You still lose because the dev team has to split their attention.

      And anyway I (and many other people!) have valid keys for basically all widevine streams extracted from supposedly secure android devices. That DRM approach ended up failing miserably and torrent sites are full of WEB-DLs.

    • But you can still stream video on normal Android devices, no? My Motorola phone supports Disney+. Why did studios object to streaming on Fire tablets unless it had kernel DRM but they're fine with streaming on easily-rootable phones?

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