Aspyr used to call themselves "the greatest Mac publisher on earth". I bought several of their ported games from the Mac App Store. All of them either had severe bugs that made them unplayable or got discontinued and taken down shortly after. Support was incapable or unwilling to help. I will never buy anything from Aspyr again as long as I live.

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Valve sabotages its own efforts by continuing on its noncommittal way of handing publishers. If they want their devices to succeed, it is long overdue that they demand of publishers that their titles will either run on the Steam Deck and Steam Machine or are kicked off the marketplace.

That would put an end to kernel-level anti-cheat in no time, which is bad anyway. The only reason why anti-cheat systems are needed at all, is because developers failed to build zero-trust into their client/server model in the first place. Take wall-hacks for example: Those are only possible because the client knows the opponents are there. But if they aren't visible, the server doesn't have to send that information to the client in the first place. Fly and speed hacks only work because the server fails at movement checking. If anti-cheat would be considered throughout development, client-side anti-cheat would simply be unnecessary. Everywhere else in IT it is considered a given that you can not trust a client. Only game developers try to protect their clients instead of securing the server endpoints.

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Write to Valve and request them to force it upon them. At least the Steam Deck is their product. They should at least require game studios to not actively hinder people from using it if they want to publish on Steam. Valve should make that a Steam policy.

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Quoting: areamanplaysgameWhat are they supposed to do about it, exactly?

Make it rule and threaten everyone who does not comply with being banned from using their platform. It would be the obvious if Valve really wanted Steam Deck and Linux Gaming to be a success. I wouldn't go as far as to require everyone to support it, but at least noone should be allowed to work actively against it by implementing countermeasures.

And on the subject of "anyone who works around anti-cheat in online games, would face a ban" being "pretty normal": Anti-cheat is being worked around the moment someone cheats. Demanding from people to give up the control over their machines is a dangerous idea, which includes requiring them to use only "blessed kernels", secure boot and other atrocities. As long as I don't cheat, I'm not doing anything wrong. If an anti-cheat-system keeps people from using their machines the way they want, it is a flawed system.

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I don't get why Valve is accepting this. The games are key to the success of Proton and the Steam Deck. It should be a requirement for anyone distributing on Steam that they not hamper technologies developed and promoted for the platform. Threatening players with a ban for using that technology is unacceptable. If I had a say in it, it would be: "You distribute on Steam, you support the features that we introduce to Steam, or you can go jump."

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