this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
403 points (98.8% liked)

Games

44023 readers
794 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Rules

1. Submissions have to be related to games

Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.

This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.

2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.

We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.

3. No excessive self-promotion

Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.

This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.

4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.

We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.

5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.

No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.

6. No linking to piracy

Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

Authorized Regular Threads

Related communities

PM a mod to add your own

Video games

Generic

Help and suggestions

By platform

By type

By games

Language specific

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Dremor@lemmy.world
JonsJava@lemmy.world
fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Dremor@jlai.lu
PerfectDark@lemmy.world
403
Valve Addresses Steam Machine Anti-Cheat Concerns, Says It's Working Towards Support (thisweekinvideogames.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
130 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] arc99@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

There is nothing worse than playing multiplayer and having somebody who is cheating. Viable and promising games have been ruined by people cheating.

But I don't see an easy way around the issue but these are the usual solutions:

  1. Reporting mechanism and admins able to observe cheaters and impose heavy penalties / permabans
  2. Add anticheat on server side that detect for cheating (e.g. measuring % hit rates / headshots)
  3. Anti cheat software on client that looks for common cheat hacks
  4. Stream everything. It's all hosted on the server, nobody installs anything, limiting ways to cheat.
  5. Disincentivize cheating by not acknowledging people doing it in any way - no rare loot, no leaderboards, no material gain
  6. Make it a 3rd party problem - release the server or sell hosting and make it somebody else's problem to police the servers (e.g. Rust / Minecraft servers)

Personally I'd prefer that multiplayer games obtain consent to install anti cheat and should certify through auditing that the anticheat software is inactive and nonintrusive when the game is not running. Perhaps operating systems could even provide hooks and hard guarantees that this is the case.

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
  1. Covered on steam with game bans, which can be handed by server admins
  2. Would be nice to see ngl. Whats not humanly possible should result in a game ban.
  3. Covered on steam by VAC, automated system checking for cheat signatures in user memory space
  4. Hard to do and not realistically feasible for the majority of people, screen capture with per pixel analysis tools would still work but thats not that big of an issue
  5. VAC and game bans also ban you from community features including trading your inventory, afaik you phone number and all accounts associated with it are banned
[–] Mesophar@pawb.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

They mean the game is streamed from a server to the player, rather than running on the player's hardware. This might not be feasible for every game studio to do, but would actually open up the game for more players to be able to play (since local hardware requirements would be lower).

I think this is a terrible idea for other reasons, but accessibility and anti-cheat aspects of it are not some of those reasons.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

I will buy one of these if valve fixes gaming on Linux. I don't even want one

[–] jerakor@startrek.website 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I did some Linux gaming during COVID and recently swapped my HTPC to Linux (Bazzite/Deck) for a console style setup in the living room. Massively improved now over my previous experience.

The game I was playing heavily this last weekend (Wildmender) absolutely runs better in Proton on Linux than it did on Windows. Less crashes, less stutters, faster load time. I assume it is due to preRendered shaders? Honestly not really sure but it is nice.

Going to do some Enshrouded on it next which is a game absolutely not at all optimized for Linux, so far it seems to be working fine but I've not gotten to that late game CPU intensity of loading areas heavily modified.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 3 points 3 weeks ago

I really hope it won't be a case of requiring a Steam Machine with SteamOS on there for this to work.

[–] SpicyTaint@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

I don't imagine the overlap of people interested in the steam machine and people playing games with invasive anti-cheat is very big.

[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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.

[–] baines@lemmy.cafe 5 points 3 weeks ago

entire box dedicated to avoiding fuckery, gamers beg to install fuckery

stupid mofos

[–] Jeffool@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Credibly_Human@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

This... doesnt make any sense... For so many reasons.

  1. 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).

  2. Steam machines aren't unique in having TPM modules. Most computers do. Even Apple computers have their secure enclave.

  3. 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.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›