I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.

Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.

Hard agreement from me, but my 16 year old bricked his PC on Sunday trying to enable Valorant’s BS anti-cheat, secure boot required crap. He even knew ahead of time that he couldn’t enable it, but the pull of online gaming turned off his brain. I don’t think we’re gonna win this battle and the war is probably done as well.

If anti-virus software can function in user mode, anti-cheat software can too. https://www.theverge.com/news/692637/microsoft-windows-kerne...

> I think the hardest battle is going to be with anti cheat. The anti cheat that developers want basically requires dystopian levels of restrictions which are against everything valve has done on SteamOS so far.

If anyone is capable of moving things along in this space, Valve should be it.

> Personally I'd love if we all just went back to playing on personal servers with your real life friends or people you otherwise trust. But I don't think this is would go over well with the average online gamer.

It's not the gamers that don't want this - although, yes, I do also want the option of matchmaking - it's the companies that don't allow dedicated servers, or shut down the servers after releasing that year's full-price version of the same game.