Free to play is always unsustainable without microtransactions unless the game is community hosted or open source. That doesn't represent the overwhelming majority of F2P.
That's definitely fair, but there is the argument that the largest source of change for major powers is through harming their economies.
Sort of like, I like the artistry from this person from X nation, but by giving them money, I am indirectly helping fuel the economy of X nation, therefore giving their goverment less incentive to change existing behavior.
The problem is that in order to achieve that collective impact, a whole lot of innocent parties who have no support for or active hostility for the existing regime are also badly impacted. Usually individuals will greatly suffer before the political or structural systems will ever change.
So it's a bit of a bind. Support Russian media, comes with the side effect of supporting the Russian regime, at least indirectly from their income flowing into taxes. End of the day, it's a choice to make.
Hell, I'm in Silicon Valley here in California, and some of my friends are also jumping off the proprietary ship because those large firms are willing to work hand in hand with federal agencies.
If you've read the NSA document disclosures by Edward Snowden, it's apparent that there is an open door for data requests. The current administration isn't a huge fan of California's diversity, so we might as well minimize our chances of being targetted...
Honestly I think self-hosted OSS for those models may be the only way to get genuinely useful results in the long term for several different subjects, since I'd imagine investors and advertisers would be unwilling to throw capital at an unrestricted platform.
Yes, but that exponentially increases ongoing costs for hosting servers for the game to perform those extra checks, and unless you're one of the Valves of the world, you aren't going to have enough data for an automated system to work properly.
Counter Strike effectively has had a server-sided anticheat since the latter half of Global Offensive's lifespan, but there are simply too many gaps in the armor - difficult to determine what counts as a violation with 99% certainty, false positives, automated peripherals used by players that "copy" real human players, and so on.
In a perfect world, the answer to this problem would be community hosted servers ran by independent admins who could audit player activity and exercise human judgements. But that would severely limit the scale of games like the Finals, since both those who could stomach the cost of hosting and the quality of matchmaking would diminish. Even after those measures, it's not bulletproof. Ask RUST players, TF2 players, DayZ/Arma players, and so forth.
Windows users are far more likely to be technically naive enough to install a cheat that will be detected by the kernel level anticheat, and the existence will also act as a deterrent and price increase on the cheat maker's side. The subset of Linux users who desire to cheat may not be affected by those changes, but other methods, like reporting, active memory checks, and pattern detection can still keep fair play.
This can't just be a one stop solution. It has to be hybrid. Otherwise the scale of PVP multi-player games we see today is impossible to maintain.
They did say and/or steamdeck, and specifically called out Wine and Proton, so I presume the changes are OS agnostic. It's just the steamdeck has become synonymous with Linux gaming in the public eye.
Those are valid concerns, but I don't see any reason to believe that a hybrid approach for handling the two ecosystem couldn't be possible. As mentioned by their discord posts, their patches to the game are directly parsed by CodeWeavers, and options for server-sided anticheat or a Valve-style "Trust Factor" are both on the table.
I could also see this being beneficial regardless of the eventualities because of the barrier of entry - novice or less tech savvy users who wish to remain on the Windows platform and desire to cheat could be more deterred (or caught) by the kernel level anticheat. On the other side of the aisle, linux users could be targeted with a Trust Factor or higher level of User-space scrutiny, given a lower likelihood for running an excessive amount of background processes (compared to Windows).
I'm currently hosed by the fact that I am in the middle of completing my Electrical Engineeing degree (approx. 2 years left), and I don't believe my credits would be transferable to an institution across the Atlantic (never mind the cost, shudder), so I can't even think about escaping until at least 2027.
If there's a better way forward so I can safely leave the nation and still achieve my degree, I'm all ears, but at least to me it seems my hands are a bit tied.
I'm currently using Win10 IOT LTSC on my main gaming rig, and Mint on my laptop to get used to the environment (started 2 years ago). It's a great way to both get used to the new ecosystem, and have a fallback cushion if some software or scenario doesn't work properly.
Shorter term: less foreign investments in the speculative industry casino of AI in their country
Longer term: A less brainrotted workforce