For the Steam Machine to change PC gaming, Valve must solve Linux's anti-cheat problem
Following months of rumors, Valve finally announced the new Steam Machine earlier this week. And while I might question the company's decision to ship a system with only 8GB of VRAM in 2026, I believe the "Gabecube" will do more for PC gaming than anything Microsoft has done in the last decade. With SteamOS and Linux, Valve has polished away many of the things that make PC gaming unapproachable to some people. Want to set a frame limit to extend your Steam Deck's battery life? It's an easy-to-find option in the Performance overlay, not something you need to dig through multiple menus to find. Want to suspend a game? That's possible on SteamOS. And now with the Steam Machine, Valve is poised to bring the fun of PC gaming to an entirely new audience: home console gamers. Even though I don't plan to buy one, selfishly I hope it's a runaway success. Like a lot of PC gamers I imagine, I'm ready to leave Windows behind. Over the last few years, Microsoft has proven to be a poor steward of the platform. The company seems more interested in pushing AI features few care for, rather than solving the issues that have plagued Windows for years. After all, it was only recently that Microsoft said it would tackle shader stutter, a problem that has plagued many recent AAA games. Worse yet, that solution may take years to fully implement. I want the Steam Machine to be the revolution that brings SteamOS to desktop PCs, but before that can happen, Valve must solve Linux's cheating problem. Right now, the Steam Deck covers two of the three pillars of PC gaming: indies and singleplayer AAA games. For some people, that's enough, but it leaves out a huge section of the PC market. Nearly four years after its release, you can't play some of the most popular competitive games, and it's all because of how easy it is to make cheating software for Linux-based operating systems.In a 2024 interview with The Verge, Riot's Phillip Koskinas summarized the issue concisely. "You can freely manipulate the kernel, and there’s no user mode calls to attest that it’s even genuine," he told the outlet. "You could make a Linux distribution that’s purpose-built for cheating and we’d be smoked."When Valve released the Steam Deck at the start of 2022, there was some hope games like Fortnite and Rainbow Six Siege would eventually be playable on the handheld, and for a while things looked positive. Toward the end of 2021, Valve announced Proton compatibility with BattlEye. A few months later, the company did the same for Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat. There's also Valve's in-house solution, VAC, which is fully supported and means the company's own games, including Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, are playable on Steam Deck. However, despite Valve's support for some of the most popular anti-cheat solutions on the market, many studios chose not to bring their competitive games to SteamOS, citing cheating concerns. Some notable examples include Fortnite, Valorant and PUBG. Those games have never been playable on Steam Deck. In fact, last fall EA withdrew Linux and Steam Deck support for Apex Legends, one of the few competitive shooters you could play on Valve's handheld. "In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game," the company said at the time. "We believe the decision will meaningfully reduce instances of cheating in our game." For EA, Riot, Epic and developers of other popular competitive games, the issue is two-fold: Cheating software is harder to detect when it's used on Linux. More importantly, for many of them there aren't enough Linux players to justify the resources needed to secure their games for every Linux distribution. For example, when Riot made its Vanguard software a requirement to play League of Legends in 2024, the studio said there were just over 800 daily users playing the game on Linux. For context, millions of people League every day. Put another way, it's a chicken and egg problem. The Steam Machine represents an opportunity for Valve. According to Are We Anti-Cheat Yet, a crowd-sourced database listing games that require anti-cheat software and whether they work through Linux or Valve's Proton compatibility layer, 682 games don't work for one reason or another. That means more than half of the 1,136 games that require anti-cheat software can't be played on SteamOS. With the nature of Linux being what it is, it's unlikely Valve could make even the most popular kernel-level anti-cheat apps work across every Linux distribution, and based on the company's approach, it doesn't have an interest in doing that. However, if Valve made a better sandbox for developers to secure their games, we could absolutely see a SteamOS version of Valorant, for instance. Studios will go where their players are. The Steam Deck has proven that. And if the Steam Machine becomes popular enough to warrant companies like EA to bring their games to SteamOS and Linux, the PC gaming landscape will suddenly be very different. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/for-the-steam-machine-to-change-pc-gaming-valve-must-solve-linuxs-anti-cheat-problem-130000088.html?src=rss
