Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

Ooh and it's a giant yellow banner you probably won't miss, and not some two-shades-ligher-than-the-background nonsense.

Good job, Valve.

FYI - the owner of this site, gamingonlinux, was a mod on the !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml community until they were caught abusing their moderator powers. Then they deleted their account and complained on mastodon that it's stupid design that mod logs are public. [Screenshot]

Instead, here's a link to the official post https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/4547038620960934857

However, it's only being forced for kernel-level anti-cheat. If it's only client-side or server-side, it's optional, but Valve say "we generally think that any game that makes use of anti-cheat technology would benefit from letting players know".

I will always love Valve for their ability to use corpospeak against corpos.

Your game has anti-cheat?

Wonderful!

I'm sure that always only results in an improved experience for all gamers, lets let them all know!

=D

That’s awesome! GTA V just screwed everyone on Linux! What a rug pull.

Easy Anti Cheat - requires manual removal

Wait, so this sketchy, privacy-invading stuff remains even after a game is uninstalled?! I had no idea.

How is this stuff not classed as malware at this point?

Any program having kernel level access is spyware. This is getting ridiculous.

I feel like they're doing this because they are going so hard with steam deck. Regardless, good on Valve for doing this.

I wonder if you phrased it the way the Play store does: This game wants permission to:

• send SMS messages
• make calls
• know your location
• stalk your family
• raid your fridge
• access, read and upload files
• manage and add contacts
• cup your balls
• go through your trash
• irritate your boss

etc.

Think anyone would install them?

Can someone explain like I’m stupid on kernel level anti cheat and why I should watch out for it? Not a dig at all, a genuine question!

Permanently Deleted

Common valve W

W steam/valve

I bought Sea of Thieves about 5 years ago. Recently, they added kernal-level anticheat (which does precisely fuck-all to actually stop cheating). While that is annoying, I'm not particularly worried because the studio that makes that game is owned by Microsoft, and like all Microsoft products, it was banished to my windows partition with the rest of the spyware.

Why is kernel-level anti-cheat even a thing?

If I was trying to prevent cheating, I'd hash the relevant game files, encrypt the values, and hard-code them into the executable. Then when the game is launched, calculated the hash of the existing files and compare to the saved values.

What is gained by running anti-cheat in kernel mode? I only play single-player games, so I assume I'm missing something.

I do everything important like banking etc on a separate device that isn't my gaming PC. This has been quite liberating since I worry less about invasive anti-cheat, drm etc. I realize not everyone wants to do this but it's been a nice compromise.

This will be helpful for discerning if a game can run on the Steam Deck. There's not many games that don't have verification (Either by Valve or ProtonDB) but for newer games with anticheat it will serve as a good rule of thumb i imagine

Probably a pessimistic take, but I don't expect this to have any discernable impact on sales, or any other effects that would discourage publishers from these practices. The average user doesn't care about or understand how these things work; they'll see an anti-cheat warning on the store page and think "Okay, tell the colonel I'll be on my best behavior then" and continue to buy the game.

Not to be annoying, but can someone please ELI5 how kernel level anti-cheat software actually works, or link good resources where I can read about it.

I wish Valve would just ban them. It's weird to have something that looks like pure malware in a Game store.

god damn right!

Nice! More games will have native Linux support

Nice.

Is this a Linux problem? I've never had to look for this detail before in Windows.

I imagine the alternative way to combat kernel-level cheats would be asking player for all his game state data, validating it on a server?

Wouldn't work on peer-to-peer and you'd have to do a bunch of unnecessary compute(recalculating every tick if player-generated data is possible according to game rules) but its the only way I can think of.