I was thinking about the anti-cheat scenario and this popped on my mine. Consider the following scenario.
Valve comes out with an alternate OS for the Steam Deck called “Steam OS Secure” which supports anti-cheats. Special proprietary blobs were added to the OS, in collaboration with the game devs, which allow it to monitor metrics at the kernel level. These anti-cheats will only be able to run on an unmodified Steam Deck which gets disabled the moment you “modify” your Deck.
(I’m unsure what “modify” means here. Maybe if the user creates a root password or if a new layer has been added on top of SteamOS)
This will come pre-installed with the Deck (Steam Deck 3 maybe), but a seperate OS without the proprietary blobs is also available and can be downloaded/installed right from the Deck itself. This can be switched anytime but it’s a lengthy procedure. Obviously, the one without the anti-cheat performs better.
What do you think about this? Would you approve this? Will your perception towards Valve change? Will it be better for gaming over all?
Edit: I can understand the dislikes. No one wants RING-0 anti-cheat on Linux. But I just want to have a discussion on this. I don’t see game devs making exceptions their game only on Linux in the near future.
How could expanding anti cheat help portable gaming? It will consume more cycles meaning the battery runs down faster while the game plays worse because the CPU is busy looking for cheats that aren’t running.
Agreed.
But it will allow for more games to run, and a significant number of people might consider buying the Deck since it can play their favourite competitive games (Valorant/PUBG/Destiny).
Will it though?
It would require the exact same investment into a new system, which is already possible, and isn’t happening.
It won’t be like proton where valve can put in the work to make it work from their side.
Developers of your “favorite competitive games” would still have to opt in, something they could but don’t do with the Steam OS version that already exists.