Summary of “Anti Cheat at Embark Studios” prensentation by Embark Studios Senior Software Engineer Tom van Dijck, at devcom in Germany on August 24.
… Linux presents an even worse situation. Because users can custom-build the OS kernel, embedding a cheat directly into the kernel and compiling it makes it nearly impossible for a game to detect its existence. “How do you detect that?” van Dijck asked, adding that while support for SteamOS and Proton will remain, platform requirements will become stricter.
Though he mentions anti-cheat on Linux being more challenging to implement that on Windows, he doesn’t seem to think that it’s impossible. He goes on to talk about “undetectable” cheating hardware becoming cheaper, which sounds like a bigger problem, but he sounds optimistic about being able to detect those as well.
IMO “platform requirements will become stricter” could mean something like only allowing signed kernels with anti-cheat module built in + secure boot.
While I agree with you (and upvoted to match), I also acknowledge that not every game is suited for that kind of server structure. Competitive ranked games, that rely on a fair matchmaking algorithm and consistent server performance, simply can’t just route matchmaking players to a random community-hosted server. And communities can’t really form that way, either.
Or to make it short, esports can’t do this while maintaining their esport status. And those are the games that need anti-cheat the most.
Me personally? I don’t even like those kinds of games. I barely play multiplayer games at all, and when I do it’s because I’m playing with friends, and couldn’t care less about my rank (if I even get one). So for my kinds of games/scenarios, community or self-hosted servers are the obvious choice with zero drawbacks. But I can still acknowledge that it’s not a solution for all cases.
Lo and behold, most multiplayer games do run on Linux!
Didn’t we have competive games before matchmaking existed? People used forums… (and met up in person, or something). Don’t route matchmaking to us then but know that we ought to have the option to host it ourselves anyway.