Quoting: denyasisWell, yes. I believe a Windows build is still required to release on Steam. No Linux exclusive releases.

I understand that is no longer policy, although it did used to be. Most games are going to be made available for Windows because marketshare. The number of all games currently on Steam is 64,289, and the number of Windows games is 64,270.

QuotePerhaps with the Deck, that has changed, hopefully.

They said during the dev conference that they don't want Deck exclusives. The big objective is to demonstrate the viability of Linux as a gaming platform to all those Windows gamers out there with their existing Steam libraries, rather than to sell lots of units.

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Quoting: pete910They have some serious work to do

Yep. With a backlog of 64,000 games and about 28 new games released per day, if they could test 63 games each day then they could catch up within five years. But the rate of new games is increasing, so they'd need to do more than that. And some games are going to need multiple tests, so they'd need to do more still.

Realistically, there will be games that never get tested. But their own decision on which games to test first is influenced by the games that people who are interested in the Deck want to play, and game developers can request a test if the Deck market is of particular interest to them.

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Quoting: pete910

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: pete910Only 10.5k to go to get all of steams library done

More than that: about 64,000.

Thats including DLC

My number was from 2021 too

That's not including DLC. With DLC it's about 98,000.

Your 11,000 would be the number that were released just in 2021.

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Quoting: pete910Only 10.5k to go to get all of steams library done

More than that: about 64,000.

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Quoting: AciDI know that Steam is a DRM...

Not really. You do need to download the games through the client, but after that it's entirely down to what the publisher chooses. If a game doesn't make use of Steam features (which need the Steam client) and hasn't included any other DRM, you can just run the games however you like. There are lots of games on Steam like that.

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Quoting: elmapulwhat about server side anti cheat? its possible to do the validation server only?

Ish. For some games server side anti-cheat is perfect, with no downsides. But if you can push more of the work to the client then the player gets better performance, better latency, and the user pays the electricity costs rather than you. So you can try to really nail down the absolute minimum information that you pass to the client, and check every interaction against a definitive server game state... or you just bung everything at the client and try to stop the client being tampered with.

Server-side anti-cheat can't stop someone from just pointing a camera at the screen, but client-side anti-cheat can't, either.

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Quoting: EhvisAren't you kind of arguing against yourself now? Why would a company that believes in the value of client side anti cheat want their system hidden from the kernel? That goes against their philosophy.

No. You've got your Windows application doing things that you want to keep secret. Cheats move to kernel space, so they can keep looking at (and changing) your application. So you move part of your application to kernel space. So the cheats run your application (and Windows) in a VM, so the hypervisor can keep looking at (and changing) your application. So you move your application to its own VM with your own hypervisor. And so on.

On Linux, you don't really need to do that, because there are people in the Linux space (such as, say, Amazon) that are quite keen on keeping one user's application isolated from another user's application, and from their infrastructure.

Tim's claim is that you can't trust Linux users because they might have compiled their own cheating kernel (like Windows users are able to create their own cheating kernel space drivers) so you want to hide your secrets from a potentially untrustworthy kernel.

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Quoting: EhvisIn the end, the only solution that would satisfy the creators of client side anti-cheat would be to have some sort of a signed Linux system that they can get root access to.

Not really. I mean, that's what they want to do, because that's what they do on Windows, and having your application running all the time gets you valuable marketing and metrics. But userspace applications under Linux can have secure enclaves that are hidden from other applications, from the kernel, from hypervisors, whatever. They don't need kernel-level client-side anti-cheat; they just want it.

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Quoting: Mountain ManKDE for some reason has the reputation of being a "bloated" desktop environment

KDE 4 had the same problem as early Gnome 3: it had bugs that affected performance, which led people to assume that it was too heavy for their machine, and it's got lots of options so it must be heavy, right? They fixed the bugs and KDE 5 is an entirely different beast to KDE 4, but once you've decided that something's a particular (and unappealing) way, it's very unusual for anyone to check it again.

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Quoting: elmapulits impressive when compared to other console launchs, but its not when compared to 90.000 games avaliable on steam for windows, and even more than that avaliable for windows in general.

It's about 64,000 games on Steam (today - there are about 28 new games added each day). It's including DLC and non-game software that gets you the higher number.

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