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.

This already existed in CS:GO, it was called Hack vs Hack. Private servers could choose whether to run anticheat or not. You'd see some with names like HvH and join to find people spinning in circles and comparing which aimbot was the most dominant.

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

That would be very interesting. I also bet that people would start developing bots that play the game better than a human could and eventually it would essentially turn into digital BattleBots.

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?

Not at that time, no - this was several years before Google decided to ship Widevine in Android

FWIW rooting the phone is not enough to get you the widevine keys.

Also some services will just downgrade you to a lower quality stream if your device doesn’t have the appropriate keys.

ARC Raiders runs fine with anticheat on Linux. As does the Finals.

Market pressure can change game studios behavior.

Battlefield 6 might never run on the average Linux desktop, but I could see a future where it would run on Steam hardware in an end-to-end Secure Boot environment.

Gamers don't like playing with cheaters.

We’re going to have to figure out a better way of dealing with cheaters.

You could be playing against an AI model specifically trained on that game. No anti cheat is going to detect that.

I find it much more likely that Valve enables Secure Boot on their Steam hardware.

I imagine that if this happens, it will be followed by popular Linux distros finally becoming serious about their Secure Boot implementations, instead of simply shimming it or seen as a rarely-used feature reserved for enterprise distros like RHEL.

Some of us actually think that having some sort of validation that our OS hasn't been tampered with is a feature and not a bug. It's only a problem when companies parlay that validation into anti-consumer DRM - but that's a political problem, not a technological one.

It's both a technological and political problem.

All the platforms that went all-in on secure boot like things and attestation are anti-consumer hellholes that slurp all your data. The evidence just does not look good. Maybe Linux is different, but it's swimming against the tide here. It would be the first of it's kind.

But again this doesn’t solve the problem where an AI model can just play the game.

Or rebooting to a secure mode where you can only run the game and maybe discord.

A few anti-cheat systems rather than inspecting the local machine look for things like impossibly fast target acquisition in FPS games, or the server noticing when a shot is taken on an opponent who’s supposed to be totally obscured. Those aren’t perfect, but they don’t require kernel-level anticheat.

Cheating detection server side is expensive and probabilistic at best, kernel level anti cheat is a purely financial decision

Not the case - lots of games including AAA ones have these things on the Steam Deck.

anti-cheat is one thing, but i'm not aware of any DRM that doesn't work on linux? I know denuvo is one of the most popular ones and it definitely does