[DiskoHexyl]

SteamOS has way more appeal to gamers in 2025 than it could have had in, say, 2004.

On the surface the lack of popular multiplayer titles that require a kernel-level anti-cheat is a heavy downside, but gaming is extremely fragmented these days. In 2004 everyone, save for the casual players, at least tried DOOM3 and Half-Life 2. In 2025 Fortnight has an all-time peak of 12M players, but at the same time there are many millions of Minecraft players who never even launched Fortnight. And DOTA2/LOL players who've never launched either of those 2. And then you see a bunch of indie titles selling tens of millions of copies, and their player base is completely unrelated to those above.

The days of the gaming mono-culture are long gone, and inability to play a limited number of Game As A Service titles is not as severe of a handicap anymore, especially since people who play those kinds of games aren't typically as interested in any other titles. For better or worse, peer pressure doesn't work as heavy these days, as it used to

[surajrmal]

I was a heavy gamer in 2004 and never played HL2 or DOOM3. I know many such people. I think games like Mario party, smash, and Mario kart were far more ubiquitous.

[SmallDeadGuy]

That just sounds like all you had access to was a Nintendo console, not necessarily due to your own choice. I missed out on all the early zelda, metroid, and mario home console games because we were a playstation family until the wii.

[shawn-butler]

Your definition of heavy gamer I think differs from the norm if your main plays were Mario kart, et al.

[lazyfanatic42]

What made you go with comparing things to 2004? Seems random, there is so much that is different in the Linux ecosystem generally, Valve just put the situation on a rocket and shot it into space.

Point taken, it really is marvelous! When I was running Gentoo Linux, and Windows 2000 back then I never thought things would be so portable and simple!

[NooneAtAll3]

> What made you go with comparing things to 2004?

I guess HL2 release?

Steam launch was late 2003 and first non-valve Steam games appeared in 2005, so "thereabouts" can be a reason as well for "Valve era"

[MetaWhirledPeas]

> the lack of popular multiplayer titles that require a kernel-level anti-cheat is a heavy downside

It's a downside if all you want to do is play those games. But it's an upside if you're hoping they someday ditch all that nonsense. This puts more pressure on those publishers.

[rtkwe]

More likely is that some linux distro like SteamOS gets a large enough install base that it actually makes sense as a target and these big platforms make their anti-cheat work on at least that distro. As unfortunate as it is not having a very strong anti-cheat or a system like Valve's VAC ban to detect and lock cheaters out leads to really shitty online experiences in public lobbies for PVP games.

[BlueTemplar]

Your comparisons are a mess.

"Casual player" is very poorly defined.

You are comparing concurrent players with unique players (IIRC half a billion for Fortnite ?)

"Many millions" hardly means anything when you use it to cover 3 orders of magnitude.

And so on and so forth...

[morshu9001]

True. Things were better the old way with so many kids at least having a video game like Melee or CoD or Halo in common. I would've liked those to run on Linux, but that doesn't matter so much.

[spookie]

Eh multiplayer games are doomed.

Computer vision based cheats using an external machine that records the game's final rendered frames, process them with specialized YOLO models, and control "mices" and "controllers" to aim for you already exist.

If the aim for kernel level anti-cheats was to combat cheating, they have failed and are completely worthless.

[fulafel]

You don't need an external machine. Since games are set up to allow twitch etc streaming, it's easy for apps on the same machine to get access to the video.

[jack1243star]

That's like saying online banking is doomed because rubber-hose cryptanalysis exists. The defense does not have to stop 100% of the exploits to be effective.

I hate kernel level anti-cheats but they do provide friction and reduce cheating.