Following months of rumors, Valve finally announced a new Steam device earlier this week. And while I may question the company’s decision to ship a system with only 8GB of vram in 2026, I believe that the “Gabecube” will do more for PC Gaming than anything Microsoft has done in the last ten years.
With Seasons and Linux, Valve has tackled many of the things that make PC gaming inaccessible to some people. Want to set a frame limit to extend Steam Deck’s battery life? It’s an easy way to find out about performance testing, not something you need to dig through multiple menus to find. Want to stop the game? That can happen to the Stombos.
And now with the Steam engine, Valve is ready to bring the fun of PC gaming to a completely new audience: home gamers. Even though I can’t plan on buying one, I selfishly hope it’s a runaway success. Like most PC gamers I think, I’m ready to leave windows behind. Over the past few years, Microsoft has proven to be a poor manager of the platform. The company seems more interested in forcing AI to care less, rather than solving the problems that have plagued windows for years. After all, it was only recently that Microsoft said it would address shack stutter, a problem that has plagued many recent AAA games. Worse, that remedy can take years to fully work.
I want Steam Machine to be the revolution that brings Steambos to Desktop PCs, but before that can happen, Valve has to solve the Linux cheating problem. Currently, Steam Deck covers two of the three pillars of PC gaming: Indies and singleplayer aaa games. For some people, it’s enough, but it leaves out a large part of the PC market. Almost four years after its release, you can’t play some of the most popular competitive games, and it’s all because of how easy it is to make software for Linux-based applications.
In the 2024 interview with VeilPhillip’s Phillip summed up the problem directly. “You can freely use the kernel, and there are no user mode calls to prove it is true,” he told the outlet. “You can make a Linux distribution chosen with the intention of cheating and we will smoke.”
When Valve released it on Steam at the beginning of 2022, there were other promising games A fork and Rainbow Six Siege eventually it will be played in the bag, and for a while things looked healthy. Towards the end of 2021, valve announced the compatibility of ntattlele. A few months later, the company did the same with Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat. There is also Valve’s In-House Solution, Vac, which is fully supported and means the company’s own games, including Counter-Strike 2 and dota 2, are played on the Steam deck.
However, despite Valve’s support for some of the most popular anti-cheat solutions on the market, many studios have chosen not to bring their competitive games to Stolos, citing cheating concerns. Some notable examples include A fork, Protection and Pubg. Those games have never been played on the Steam deck. In fact, the last fall of Inuux and Steam Deck support for Legends of the Apexone of the few competitive brads you can play with a valve hand.
“In our internal anti-cheating practices The topWe have identified the Linux OS as a means of exploiting a variety of exploits and scams. As a result, we decided to block Linux OS access to this game, “said the company at the time.” We believe that the decision will reduce the conditions with confidence in our game. “
For EA, Riot, Epic and the developers of other popular competitive games, the argument is 2 fold: cheating software is difficult to find when running on Linux. Most importantly, for many of them there are not enough Linux players to justify the resources needed to protect their games on all Linux distributions. For example, when violence makes its Vanguard software a must-play League of Legends By 2024, the studio said there are more than 800 daily users playing the game on Linux. Literally, millions of people Clean every day. Put another way, it’s a chicken and egg problem.
The Steam engine represents the opportunity of the valve. According to Anti-Cheat-Cheats However, a fried database of the list of data that requires anti-cheat software and whether it works with Linux or Valve’s Proton Proton layer, 682 games do not work for one reason or another. That means more than half of the 1,136 games that require anti-cheat software cannot be played on Stombos.
By the nature of Linux being that, it is possible that the most popular valve can make the most popular kernel-cheat anti-cheat applications work for all Linux systems, and based on the company’s approach, it has no interest in doing so. However, if Valve makes a better sandbox for developers to protect their games, we could absolutely see a Stombos version of ProtectionFor example.
Studios will go where their players are. Steam Deck proved that. And if the Steam machine is popular enough for publishing companies like EA to bring their games to Stolos and Linux, the PC gaming landscape will suddenly be different.
