See, this is what they should have been doing from the start. Actually add value for gamers rather than try to win market share through exclusivity agreements. This is how you complete with valve. Do more of this.

This will take the form of kernel level anticheat though. No thanks.

Yes, but anti-cheat is still one of the biggest pain points of someone who might want to switch over. And just telling people to give up on their favorite games isn't a real option.

We don't have to use it. But having the option - any option - is better than none at all.

The percentage of games that don't work on Linux due to anticheat is so low that I don't see this mattering in the long run.

This is about market capture, not compatibility. This isn't about expanding the existing library, but opening the door for future titles to make kernel level anti cheat a requirement. While the current community will likely turn their nose up, Linux gaining traction means there's a growing line of users that may not.

The job title should be "Tech Traitor".

No, it absolutely shouldn't be an option, because there's no valid reason to give that much access to an anti-cheat, and it will get abused.

Even Microslop realized it's a bad idea and plans to get rid of it.

Fortnite player levels must be an all time low so they're finally now going to cater to steam Deck users when they previously told us we didn't matter...

..... Oh also probably steam machine is imminent

No Linux Epic doing Linux. That’s progress!

Ah yes, hire people right after laying a ton of people off, including those with cancer.

Tim Sweeney has got to be one of the worst business people I've seen, but unfortunately hes a good hype man and thats 99% of running a business these days

That's the thing I don't ever see Linus approving a merged request to add a kernel level anti-cheat (rootkit) into the Linux kernel. So they will have to come up with another way. Also at this point kernel level anti-cheat doesn't even work anymore. It's like the TSA its their to make people (investors) feel safe but really does very little to stop the thing it's meant to and Inconvenience and annoy legit customers. Just like with DRM and pirates.

How do you even begin to make an anticheat for Linux? It just takes one person to make an Ubuntu (or any other popular distro) distro that gives fake answers to whatever API an anticheat program may use. You just download that distro and use cheats. It would be indistinguishable from the upstream distro.

Does revitalize not mean what I think it does or is the headline plain wrong? Because I'm pretty sure Linux multiplayer was never more alive than it is now.

Probably start with a kernel module. Gonna see games requiring dkms soon.

Easy Anti-Cheat already works on Linux, they literally just have to enable it in their games

I mean, didn't the nvidia private driver need to be added by recompiling the kernel? They could just install it like that right? Not that i approve of it, but i think there is a way.

True but they can be a version compatibility nightmare. Plus part of that being recompiled in means the non blob bits are open source in this case GPL and MIT. A anti cheat would not want that to be open source as it would be a cat and mouse game with the cheaters having an open book.

Probably going to be written as eBPF which is what all the corpo antivirus stuff does today.

Doesn't need to be added to the kernel, you can load kernel code in from user level at runtime.

https://ebpf.io/what-is-ebpf/

eBPF