Another milestone for Valve here, as the Steam Deck has now managed to hit the 14,000 mark for games that are rated either Playable or Verified.

Of course there are many non-verified games that run fine as well.

For comparison, the Switch has somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 games.

Source: Wikipedia lists about 5000, Nintendo says “over 5000”, but this website claims 10,880. Part of why the Moby Games website lists more is because it lists multiple versions of a game as separate games (Xenoblade DE is listed 4 times for example).

  • Chewy
    8•9 months ago

    One of the reasons Vanguard is so effective is that it starts early during boot, which makes it more difficult to develop a cheat. This also results in Vanguard running all the time, unless someone wants to reboot to play Riot’s games.

    All anti cheat can be circumvented, and platforms are different to what extend they want to allow access to the system. Even macOS doesn’t allow such deep access like Windows does, but it also limits access in general.

    It’s great that on Linux ac are limited to userspace. Userspace anti cheat with server side ac works well enough for games like Overwatch in my experience.

    • @msage@programming.dev
      4•9 months ago

      Nice write up, but it doesn’t touch my question.

      There are cheats that only read the screen, they don’t even need to run on the same PC.

      So why kill your customers with anticheat acting like a spyware for something they will never solve.

      • @GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
        6•9 months ago

        You could say the same about door locks. It’s not going to stop a thief who wants to get in from getting in. So why even have a lock on the door? Because it will prevent nosey people from getting in.

        Similarly anticheat won’t prevent anyone dedicated to cheating, but it does prevent the “script kiddies” who would cheat if it was super easy.

      • Chewy
        3•9 months ago

        There are always ways around anticheat. Why do companies demand Ring 0 access anyway?

        Because it makes detecting cheats running on the same machine easier. Sadly many companies don’t care much about it’s users privacy and security ideals.

        So why kill your customers with anticheat acting like a spyware for something they will never solve.

        Sadly there’s enough people/content creators who ask for kernel level anti cheats. It comes up from time to time in Overwatch and CS communities, especially the latter. The amount of people like us, who purposely don’t play a game for it’s invasive ac is likely really small.

        People go and play CS checking whether the enemy is likely cheating, while people are playing Valorant believing cheaters will be detected. This makes them less likely to cry “cheater” over a few lucky shots.

        There are cheats that only read the screen, they don’t even need to run on the same PC.

        On consoles external cheat devices are popular today. They allow for mouse and keyboard usage while also having the controller aim assist, as they spoof an official controller.

        It’ll be interesting how long it takes until ML assisted cheats plug in between pc and monitor. Will Vanguard forbid capture cards at this point?