Quite famously, Unity had a reputational problem because of this. Free users were required to show the splash screen, but companies with larger war chests could pay the higher rate to skip it. It led to Unity being associated with low-budget and amateurish games, while higher quality games running on the same engine, which would be better advertising for Unity, tended to not show the logo.
Anti-cheat is not heading toward more support without the intervention described in the article. Whatever that results in. Valve is talking about potentially a SteamOS-specific fix, which I take to mean that they might have to do something at a kernel level that other Linux distros would find unacceptable. “Only” EA, Riot, Epic, Roblox, and Call of Duty is grossly underselling this: that is most of the video game market. It’s not most games, nor is it most publishers, but between those games and publishers, it represents most players, most dollars spent, and most time spent playing video games (at least non-mobile, anyway). It is an enormous hump to get over if you want to make a gaming device appealing to more customers.
The one thing they always say is how few users are on Linux. If that’s true then most of the hackers can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.
Sure it does. As an example, let’s say there are X players for a game in a month, and 3-7% of those are on Linux. If, as Facepunch says, more than half of that 3-7% are cheaters, then including them is doing more harm than good to your cheating problem.
To be fair to devs, increasing the FOV has a lot of performance implications on how much less they’re culling from the scene as you rotate the camera. In this era of open world games, I suspect it scales very poorly as that FOV increases. Temporarily increasing the FOV is also one of their handy tricks for giving you a sense of speed when you hit a boost button and whatnot, so whatever your FOV is, they need to make it more than that.
Sound test menus are a remnant of arcade design, and when arcades starting dying, this feature made less sense. The OST sale is usually more of a revenue stream for the game’s composer, as I understand it.
Monopoly has been one of the most popular board games for about a century, and hardly anyone plays by all of the official rules. Once I buy a game, if I want to play with house rules, I should be able to. Putting the sliders and such in game, even with the warning message mentioned above, just makes it easier to do so without having to rely on the community to make mods.
I’m generally with you, but there are implications for the online game and matchmaking in the likes of Dark Souls games. By the time they got to Elden Ring, they seemed to care way less about things like invasions.
All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players’ machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don’t do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.
As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I’ve seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we’re looking for them.
I’m no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who’s red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.
If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)
So the only thing that’s allowed to be speculated is that the companies are perfectly honest and never lie? Yeah, maybe you’re not that reasonable.
A bit of skepticism is healthy, but it’s far more reasonable to assume that independently reporting the same thing from multiple different unaffiliated companies is the truth compared to making up stories about executive meddling or that banning Linux increases the percentage of hackers, based on nothing except your own feelings.
I daily drive Kubuntu. I hate Windows. I have a Windows partition, but I haven’t booted it since December of last year. My next PC won’t have Windows at all. The operating system I use doesn’t change what is actually happening in the real world.
If they can’t stop the hacking on Windows then what the hell is blocking Linux going to do?
It’s going to prevent a more potent vector, which is exactly what they said.
Your explanation is bordering on conspiracy theory, so yes. Rust cited why they cut support, as did Apex Legends, as did GTA Online. The rest often don’t even bother with supporting it in the first place because of how it always plays out. The existence of hackers at all doesn’t mean that Linux anti-cheat is equally effective, and you’d know that if you read the write up from the Rust team.
Please cite sources for any of that. Game companies aren’t in the business of losing money. If they could make more money by supporting Linux customers, they would do so, and I’ve never heard of a gaming company’s executive ever mentioning anything about Linux except for Gabe Newell, openly or behind closed doors. If they wanted to make a big show of getting rid of cheaters, they’d never have enabled cross play between consoles and PC in the first place. They openly tell you why they don’t enable anti-cheat on Linux, in a way that’s beyond just being plausible, and you refuse to believe them. You’re only going to be surprised when this continues to happen even though the answer is right there.
I wish you the best in convincing devs with the data in front of them that there’s no difference between the two, but they seem to have data that indicates that they see fewer cheaters with ring 0 anti-cheat than when they let Linux players in with user space anti-cheat. If it were true that there’s no difference, surely Valve’s engineers could convince them of that, too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
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.
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.