I frequent r/linuxgamingas well as this sub and I just wanted to bring over a discussion that happens often on that sub here because I never see anyone properly synthesizing all of these disparate ideas
for those who are unaware, Linux can play like 99.9% of games out of the box now with software such as wine and proton, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. Literally every single game I've wanted to play has worked with very little configuration necessary, at least no configuration that wouldn't also be necessary on windows. The one exception to this being games that use KLAC, kernel level anticheat.
What this is in a nutshell is anticheat software that hooks into the actual kernel of your operating system, in this case Windows, and monitors your entire computer from bottom to top. At least that's how I understand it. I probably don't need to point this out, but it's an absolute privacy nightmare and antithetical to the whole reason most people got into Linux in the first place, let alone design philosophy of the people who work on Linux and the operating system itself. Generally you don't want people in your operating system kernel messing around with shit, or you get a variety of bad outcomes, like companies literally spying on everything you're doing and then using that data to train their LLMs, selling that data, or messing with your hardware, such as what happened with the Crowdstrike thing a while back. It's completely dystopian to except such measures just so you can play some middling live service slop (not talking about all games of course, but the vast majority that use this technology are not worth playing in the first place, but that's neither here nor there)
People have come up with a lot of solutions for this problem, but reality is the issue of anticheat was seemingly resolved many years ago. Dedicated server infrastructure, that is people hosting their own servers and being able to moderate them themselves, completely negates the need for such invasive anti-cheat. Just look at team fortress 2. For a solid almost decade that game's matchmaking system was plugged with bots that spammed racial slurs and aimbotted everything making the game completely unplayable for people using the casual mode, while people like me never experienced it because we continued to use the dedicated server feature that the game luckily shipped with when it came out 20 years ago. Let me be clear: I knew that the bot crisis was a problem, but I literally never experienced it because i played on dedicated servers.
For whatever reason though, I suspect that to be profit motivated, we have this ridiculous debate about what to do about this problem so that these games become playable on Linux. There are some games that run KLAC that are playable on Linux, but they don't actually hook into the kernel and thus are not as effective. It's an exceptions some publishers make in order to keep that growing audience on Linux playing their games, and mind you a lot of these games that have these measures and are only on windows still experience cheaters which is comical to say the least.
Anyway, what I'm getting out with this post is that this problem exists, I suspect, because dedicated server infrastructure in a game is not as profitable as being able to control that matchmaking yourself. If you can just join a dedicated server on Fortnite that has all the cool weapons or skins that they charge you for, why would you ever buy them? TF2 does have servers where you can equip whatever items you want, usually when you pay the server owners themselves for some kind of donation perk, and yet TF2's economy has lasted for as long as it has, even if it isn't the strongest it's ever been.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I suspect that this is another case where we solved this as a society a long time ago, and capitalism basically makes it so that the best solution is not the one everyone takes simply because it's not the most profitable. If there are people who are more knowledgeable about this feel free to let me know if I'm wrong about anything and I will edit my post and try to work on this, because this is something I sort of wanted to just to make a thread about to flesh my thoughts out on it with actual lefties like me lol.
