Of course I’m serious. “Not 100% effective” is not the same as “not effective”. And to be clear, I hate it and do not endorse it. I will not buy any game that goes as far as to use that kind of anti-cheat. But developers use it because it’s more effective at catching cheaters than not using it. All downvoting me does is cover your ears to what’s actually going on. There are a number of big live service games that once enabled Proton and have now disabled it after cheaters took advantage of the more lax security. They would not cut off a portion of their customer base if they didn’t have to because user space in Linux was somehow just as effective as the Windows variant that lives at ring 0 in the OS kernel.

Of course not. Go read the reports of any developer who once enabled Linux compatibility and then disabled it.

I’m with you, but you’ve got a lot of people to convince. A lot. The people playing those games make up the majority of the market.

I’m not sure what there is to gain by pretending that downvoting me changes anything.

People have all sorts of custom controllers with different button layouts. There are tournament legal requirements, but you’re unlikely to violate them if you don’t know what they are, and it hardly matters if you’re playing from home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They refused to support the user space anti cheat. The work they’re talking about doing here is aiming to be the same sort of security they get on Windows. Low level. I have no idea how that works with Linux’s software licenses, but they said in the interview that this might be an exception made only for SteamOS.

I would not be surprised if the work they’re doing here would be compatible with the Deck. It was just less of a priority for a handheld than a living room machine.

The way that it was enabled under Proton was less secure than it was in Windows because it operated at a higher level; their inability to run it at that lower level is why they disabled it. This article means that Valve is looking at ways to grant them that lower level.

Interesting. Did this happen recently? When all of the streaming services starting raising prices, I started cancelling. Which ones give you full HD? Do you need to go out of your way to get there, or will regular old Firefox do the trick? Does it need TPM enabled or anything like that? I was looking to re-up Amazon Prime in the very near future, but when watching on my web browser, a show like Vox Machina was just a blur factory, and it was easier to pirate the show than it was to stream it legitimately.

Grand Theft Auto Online, Battlefield 6, Destiny 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Fortnite, and on and on.

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.

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.

Hunting around a level for health packs before it wasn’t great either.

If it was before XP, it was all DOS underneath.

Have you played the Metal Gear Solid series? If not, don’t look them up beforehand. And this might seem strange, but for the optimal effect, don’t pirate them either.

I’ve heard High on Life is a metroidvania, but I haven’t played it myself. You’re right that 3D metroidvanias are exceptionally rare.

Batman: Arkham Asylum. It doesn’t come up a lot, because only that first game is a metroidvania and Arkham City might be most people’s favorite in the series, but it absolutely counts. I love Arkham combat. It’s better in the sequels due to some slight tweaks in game feel, but that combat in a metroidvania is just excellent, and the game is just so well paced. It’s a shame what WB did to that studio.

They’re just games that favor those categories. Even if Peak pops off, it’s not going to win a category like art direction or narrative, ever. It was far from a slow year.

The only explanation I can come up with is that they’re a studio that reliably ships finished projects, and maybe that was all Paradox was looking for.

Echoes of Paradox moving Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 to The Chinese Room for some reason none of us on the outside understand.

I don’t believe I said anything like “all games deserve ongoing maintenance”.

If it costs them nothing, then what does the cost of servers have to do with anything? If someone else wants to run servers at their own expense, that’s their prerogative. Why would you have an issue with a bad game remaining playable? That’s valuable history that everyone can learn from.

In this case, the ask is to release the server binary and allow users to point their game to a different server when the official one is gone.

What do you believe the cost to Sony is for community-run servers?

Your entry level PC is what I would have called high end as little as four years ago. I built a machine in 2021 with a Ryzen 5 5600x and an RX 6800 XT; it still runs the latest UE5 games at high settings. I would call that above and beyond entry level.

Yeah, leaving it ambiguous like this leads to wild speculation, and I think you misquoted that with your own assumptions. You might be right, but Digital Foundry seems to think $400-$500 is possible. Given the cost of my own mini PC, which is older and requires higher margins than Valve can get away with, I would even believe $400-$500. But we just don’t know. Everyone’s best guess for the price of this thing has a low floor and a high ceiling, which will make this all really funny once we know the actual price.

that will cost more than a console

Is that part of the quote? Because I just saw “priced like an entry level PC, not like a console”, which was more ambiguous than saying “priced like a console”. One man’s entry level PC is $300, and another’s is $1000. I have a mini PC with the power of a PS4 Pro, which I’d easily consider entry level, and it cost me $530 about a year and a half ago.

I liked it a lot. It’s engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it’s beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.

The correct lesson to take away from it, that they won’t ever do, is to release multiplayer games in a way where they can live on without constant updates or a central server.

Going from YouTube comments on gaming channels that don’t focus on PC gaming or Linux, I don’t think many people remember the first Steam Machines from 10 years ago.

That was a conscious decision they made at the time so that you could browse the web and such with no driver downloads. The full functionality of it is kind of locked behind Steam itself (without community made software), which is its worst quality, for sure.

So, funny story, I bought it as the Windows variant, because it was $50 cheaper for some reason. Bloatware subsidies, maybe? My roommate and I tried it for a little while, but using Windows from the couch sucked so much that I put SteamOS on it. My roommate only booted back to Windows to play Hearthstone. I just rocked whatever SteamOS would let me play local, since streaming games from my desktop in the other room wasn’t cutting it for me. I played through KOTOR2 on that machine, on SteamOS, and had a great time.

Why would you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a PC that used a brand-new operating system and had a gaming library a fraction of the size of that of Windows machines?

I had one of the old Alienware Steam Machines. I know it wasn’t a popular answer, but my answer to this was that Windows was atrocious for the living room just like it’s atrocious for handhelds today, and I had easily and cheaply amassed a large library of Linux-compatible games even back then by way of Steam sales. But this wasn’t even the only problem. We only had OpenGL ports rather than lower level and more performant APIs like Vulkan. Running a marquis Linux title like Shadow of Mordor would come with a sizable performance hit compared to the Windows version, even when run on exactly the same hardware, and that would also require a machine that cost $200 more than a PS4 that could run the same game just as well.

Console gamers who don’t know what Steam is

How common do you believe this is in 2025? It’s on every big game’s launch trailer, and Steam dwarfs any console player base. Network effects alone should make just about every console player (who’s old enough to read) aware of what Steam is.

I’ve got a bit of a VR library, but the new ease of setup with this one does have me considering how I’d use the virtual display features. Even with trackpads, a lot of mouse-driven games aren’t great on Steam Deck, but I’m replaying Baldur’s Gate 2 right now and wondering how the mouse controls might work out in VR.