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.
Please make this optional. I’d rather not have any third party kernel modules mucking around in my OS. I don’t use anything the requires this.
The article only mentions TPM not 3rd party modules. I’m guessing the idea is that you will have to run an approved kernel.
Kernel modules can be installed, loaded, and run without a reboot in Linux. TPM support would just ensure that the firmware/kernel and modules loaded at boot are expected.
Edit: basically, TPM support wouldn’t really do what a game dev would want for a kernel that can be modified at runtime, unless I’m missing something
Well yeah of course it’s optional already. If you don’t want that then you just don’t buy those games.
Currently kernel-level anti cheat isn’t available for Linux, so games that are released with multiplayer support don’t require it (e.g. games that enable Linux support in EAC).
If kernel-level anti cheat is supported by Valve, many of those games will start requiring it. So if you don’t want kernel stuff, there’s a real chance this development will reduce the number of available games in the future.
Except people are going to still buy those games, still complain for something to be done and when the potential resolution is there, they’ll go “I DON’T WANT IT!” and just cycle through.
Fuck sakes, some people…