this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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When starting a new game, don't include that stuff. Not including proprietary stuff without meeting the licensing requirements is already a step in the process.
There is a reason it's included though. Stuff like fmod, bink video etc. does complicated things that you otherwise need to implement yourself.
When the law passes, the owners of proprietary functionality will adapt their licensing to meet the requirrments or go out of business when everyone stops using them.
Look I get it. The planet is dying, income inequality, it seems everything is unfair and going to shit. People yearn at an opportunity to help make things better. But yelling for simple solutions is the opposite of helpful. Because there are no simple solutions.
Saying to "just open source it" does not make sense.
What do you do about:
Making single player games without always online DRM: yes totally doable
Running game servers of online games forever: not really doable, as soon as all the libraries etc. they depend on are unsupported they will shut down one way or another. You need staff basically forever. Not even mentioning the maintenance headache that every legacy system always turns into.
Letting people run their own dedicated servers: sometimes doable, depends on the game though. Some games do not have "a server" but a whole infrastructure of stuff, look at foxhole. Some "servers" are a house of cards barely held together by duct tape.
This initiative all comes down to the definition of "reasonable". What is reasonable, actually? Running an infrastructure at a loss until bankruptcy? Or just keeping it online until it starts making a loss.
This has nothing to do with open source.
Nothing.
Open source has zero relevance.
None whatsoever.
Nada.
Their licensing will change so that it doesn't restrict keeping the game alive after servers go down or their license can't be used to kill an otherwise functional game. That's it.
Games will be designed to include the ability to do private servers after the company servers go down. It will be a cost of development just like anything else they are required to do. If they don't want to include that, then they can choose not to make an online game.
"That stuff" is often core to the game. Any anti-cheat library, for example. On the client site, libraries like physx, bink video, and others are all proprietary and must be replaced and tested before it can be released in a working state. Few companies would release a non-functional game and let reviewers drag them through the mud for it.
None of those things will be affected because this isn't about making games open source. It is about making games that have a design that allows them to potentially function indefinitely instead of allowing the companies to design them with planned obsolescence like tying single player games to server verification.
So you're telling me that this could disrupt the anti-cheat industry, which is currently responsible for a lot of the Windows platform lock in the gaming industry and is tied to a lot of potential security vulnerabilities because it goes to a much higher level of privilege than a reasonable user would expect a game to need? I already wish I was in the right geographic area to sign, you don't need to sell me on it twice!
Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games. No one wants to play a game against cheaters since they typically have an unfair advantage. If you can't combat cheating then you might as well not make the game since no one will want to play it. Fine by me since I don't care for such games but I could imagine people who like playing them might prefer to play against as few cheaters as possible. What are the alternatives?
Battlefield and cod have cheaters running rampant in their official servers despite using anti cheats. They could employ a team to monitor cheating reported by players. But clearly they just don't want to expend resources to combat that.
EvE Online doesn't use root access anticheat software. I know it doesn't because it runs on Linux just fine. That particular player base is the worst hive of scum and villainy that you'll find outside of government. Clearly the anticheat software isn't as essential as game studios would have you believe. The only major cheating I'm aware of in EvE was the BoB scandal, and that involved Devs cheating because they were Devs.
Can the EvE online method be applied to dissimilar games like e.g. fps games?
No clue, I just know that it exists and seems to work with the scammiest scammers that ever scammed
Client-side anti-cheat is useless. It's not a necessary evil, it's just evil. The minute the cheater/hacker has direct access to the system, you've already lost.
Much like every form of security measure, the intention is not to completely eliminate the possibility of an attack (which is impossible in most cases). Instead, the intention is to increase the amount of effort that's required to make an attack.
What you're referring to is deterrence, and it doesn't apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn't ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.
And the efficacy being so bad is the reason why client-side anti-cheat keeps getting more and more invasive to the point of being literally, by definition, a type of malware and system rootkit. And yet it's still not enough to defeat cheaters, because the cheaters have full access to the system itself.
And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.
Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person?
Source?
What do you mean by system in "full access to the system"? Too vague to even say anything about.
The potential guys that can write the cheat software and how quickly it can be developed is the part that matters. Much like when it's easy to use an exploit once it's already discovered. Someone still has to discover the exploit.
You made the comparison: "Much like every security system"
It's out there, my dude. It's a constant complaint in literally every competitive online game. If people are complaining about it, then it's not working well enough. This isn't an esoteric thought either. You ask anyone if cheating is a big issue in online gaming and anyone with knowledge about it will tell you it's a constant problem that's getting worse.
If you own the hardware and have admin/root access to the OS. Then it's yours and you have "full access" to everything. And I do mean everything. You can modify the OS. You can read the values of protected parts of memory. And so on.
If you don't understand what I mean by "full access to the system" in the context of anti-cheat running on your own hardware, then there's nothing I can say in a short comment to get you up to speed.
The cheat and anti-cheat battle is a constant cat and mouse game. The advantage is always with the cheaters because they outnumber the developers 100:1 at the least. Plus they have the will and determination to find ways around anti-cheats. In fact, building security against exploits is by far way harder than finding exploits.
The reality is that client-side anti-cheat is a losing battle.
So just don't let them join/kick them from your server?
Before you can do that, you need to determine whether someone is cheating. This is the purpose of anti-cheat software.
Do you have spies behind you when playing cards too?
This is why code should be written to be library-agnostic. Or, rather, libraries should be written to a particular open source interface standard to make library agnosticism easier.