Exactly.

The Internet forgets it constantly and shitty slop farms like modern day vice love to ignore it:

Call of Duty isn’t just competing with Fortnite. They are both competing with Andor and the NFL and mr beast and Subway Surfers and so forth. Also dating but genz is extra genz about that.

Its a tale as old as time itself. Once you have disposable income you have responsibilities. Some people insist “games aren’t as good as they used to be because I didn’t spend 500 hours playing Final Fantasy 29 over and over again”. Others are unable to respond because they slept wrong and tweaked their neck.

Other outlets (including both Aftermath and Remap which are ACTUALLY the gaming news parts of the good vice…) have talked about this ad nauseum. Kids, generally, aren’t buying even 50 dollar games. They are playing f2p shit on their phones or playing fortnite or roblocks which are also both f2p games. And the spending for those is generally not tracked alongside the GTAs and the like.

Like, we all shit on Sony for their horrific mismanagement and their quest for a live service game (and cheer that they aren’t as bad as microsoft, I guess?). But… there is a reason for that. That might not be what us olds want to play (I actually like some live service games but whatever…). It is more conducive to what people who still have time to spend money on gaming want. Which is ALSO why there is such a big push for “collector’s editions” and “limited re-releases” so that the olds who don’t have time to play will still buy a 200 dollar cartridge they’ll never use.

Depending on the model, inference can be run with CPU only. To distinguish what was originally proposed (a momentary flick consistent with aimbotting), you are either doing ray tracing (really expensive) or analyzing (effectively) video feeds. Both of which tend to put things more into the GPU realm which drastically increases the cost of a server.

But also? The only way these models can work is with constant data. Which means piping feeds back home for training which basically is never inexpensive.

Aside from that: if it was as simple as you are suggesting then this would be a solved problem. Similarly, if people don’t care about hackers outside of e-sports then there would be no reason for games to spend money on anti-cheat solutions when any match that matters would have heavy scrutiny. And yet, studios keep pumping out the cash for EAC and the like.

Machine Learning is really good at CLAIMING it detected that.

The reality is that every few months there is a story about a fairly big streamer/e-sports player MAYBE getting caught cheating on stream. Sometimes it is obvious and sometimes it really becomes “Did they just know the map well enough to expect someone to come around that corner?”.

And a lot of times… it really is inconclusive. A somewhat common trope in movies is the veteran gunslinger literally aims at the wall of a stairwell and tracks where they expect the head to be and either fires a few rounds through the wall or waits for them at the bottom and… that is not entirely inconceivable considering that people tend to not crouch or move erratically down stairs. Obviously Jonathan Banks has a wallhack but Mike Ehrmantraut is just that damned good.

And false positives are a great way to basically kill a game. ESPECIALLY if they are associated with demonstrably false negatives too.

But you can be damned sure most of the major esports games are already doing this. It really isn’t expensive to train and they have direct feeds of every player in a tournament or twitch event. The issue is that there are (hopefully) tens of thousands of servers active at any moment and running Computer Vision+Inference on every single server is very costly.

And… I seem to recall there was a recent intentionally poorly defined Movement about maybe keeping user hostable dedicated servers a thing? How does that mesh with having every single server need to phone home (a fraction of) all 32 players feeds to a centralized cluster?

1. So… bootlegging?
2. Why? How many people even still have DVD drives, let alone blu-ray? Especially when USB sticks are dirt cheap if you really want portable media to give to someone else.

First, Yo. Doesn’t even need to be a good password.

Second, what you are describing is something very different. Outside of very rare situations (most of which theoretical or specifically targeting a specific system by a state level actor), to be able to “boot the bios and disable it” would generally mean the machine is already VERY compromised or the bad actor has physical access to the machine.

A good way of thinking of it is that secure boot isn’t the lock on the door. It is the peephole that you look through to make sure that the person with your pizzas is from Georgio’s AND you actually ordered pizza. Rather than just opening the door because “Yo, free food”.

On its own? It doesn’t do much. But it goes a LONG way towards improving security when combined with other tools/practices.

I mean… the people who play these games very regularly do accept that.

Valve is also barely a blip in the market when it comes to this, funny enough.

Valve’s data can be more or less officially pulled and steamdb lists them as having 1 million concurrents in whatever the default window is (looks like this month). Call of Duty claims to be closer to 70 million but most conservative estimates agree they are at least in the low 10s of millions of “active players” rather than anyone who just popped in to check their dailies to see if they wanted to do them.

Personally? I think the vast majority of games (including Battlefield…) would be perfectly fine with VAC and I like VAC. But there are reasons that the studios that make more money than some small nations on their games (as opposed to their storefront, which is what VAC actually is based on) literally pay for more invasive solutions.

Which is actually the other point worth remembering. Punkbuster and EAC and rolling their own costs money. Whereas VAC is “free” with Steam (and possibly elsewhere but that gets murky). Many of the mega games are associated with their own proprietary launchers but plenty of midtier games that ONLY care about Steam still feel the need to pay for EAC or whatever.

And… there is a reason beyond “We want to spend money to hurt our users”.

Okay. Apparently EAC is free if you sell your game on Epic but… ain’t fucking nobody considering EGS their be all end all platform. Even frigging Epic sued the hell out of Apple to get into the app store for crying out loud (not quite the same but roll with me).

Yup. Securing your “supply chain” is a VERY VERY good thing to do from a security standpoint and secure boot is one step toward that.

There are a lot of good reasons for secure boot both in game and in general. If your distro does not support it then that should be a complaint directed towards the maintainers. And… getting that through Proton is a different mess.

But EA have been spending the past year or so actively updating older Battlefields (I want to say all the way back to 3?) to actively block linux/proton. For whatever reason, they actively want to block anything but Windows for their games.

And they should just make good games too, right?

The issue with “just analyze the players” is that it is VERY expensive computationally. And it causes issues with non-official servers as it drastically increases the cost of a dedicated server and makes a listen server nigh unusable.

To be clear: I do not think the kernel level anti-cheats are a consumer friendly solution. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to insist you know better than decades worth of research and work in trying to stop hacking.

You DO realize that you aren’t their bosses, right? That was Microsoft. Microsoft almost assuredly saw a LOT of internal content. It just didn’t get packaged up into sizzle reels to be shown at the keighleys for 50k for a few seconds in between kojima appearances.

At the end of the day, game development is a business. You only see what is deemed worth publishing. Take Night Dive for example. They have a ridiculously solid portfolio and, outside of System Shock (which was kickstarted?), don’t talk about ANYTHING until it is ready to release. Does that mean they are in a constant state of doing nothing and deserving to get fired up until that brief window where we all see Hexen and Heretic being pulled from store shelves a few hours before a (funny enough) Microsoft press conference?

… Actually I could very much see Microsoft take that route if they owned Night Dive. “They haven’t uploaded anything to youtube. Let’s fire their asses. Oh, shit. Danny O’Dwyer just skeeted that he is driving up to Washington again. Okay, give them a week and we’ll probably get a few million bucks out of them”

It doesn’t take “6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop”. They are pushing vertical slices, proofs of concepts, etc internally near constantly. The issue is when you get told “no, not like that. We want it to be more… you know?” and so much of that work gets scrapped. ESPECIALLY as time moves on and those vertical slices are also being done alongside levels, weapons, cutscenes, etc all while never knowing what the gameplay even will be.

Is there an issue at multiple levels of management? Yeah. But when you have a single “boss” you tend to actually have something. It might not be great but you have a vision you can work towards and release. Rather than five new visions every time you get a new contact at HQ.

But hey, keep on leaping to defend the mega corporations.

Another “great” example is the bad CGI in most modern Marvel-Disney movies. And that is because the VFX studios don’t even get the actual full scene until VERY late in the cycle. And they might not even get the final costumes until literally days before it is due (because “leaks”). When you are completely redoing the entire scene because now Cap shoulder tackles the helicopter instead of dodges around it AND don’t even know what colors he is wearing it is REALLY hard to get the lighting and dust to look right. And your team is completely over-stretched because you are not just doing one scene: You are doing five. Even though you agreed to four.

And you can bet countless clowns are out there talking about how the VFX studios suck and blah blah blah/

And, much like it is always shown, that is a problem of management at the publisher level. Visceral Games is generally one of the most well documented but every major studio with a similar “uh derr, how they not have game after five years. They deserve to die” story is a similar tale:

The studio heads and the publisher could never agree. Often there are mandates for specific technology (Visceral was forced to use Frostbite which even the Battlefield devs hate) and publisher level management can never be bothered to actually look at anything other than a full pitch level vertical slice… which they then say is not good enough or “Continue but make massive non-specific changes”.

The end result is that game dev, which already takes years, gets stretched out because so much work gets thrown out and completely redone whenever the managers actually communicate. And then the studio is gutted, jackasses online talk about how it was obviously the answer, and said managers get to move on to hopefully work with devs who can deliver products in spite of them.

So… maybe don’t just parrot the bullshit for the companies mismanaging the industry and destroying the livelihoods of the people who actually make the games we claim to like?

Been looking forward to this for a while.

I just hope they figured out whatever was going on that made it nigh unplayable on desktops/TVs. Something about the way the graphics were upscaled just gave me (and apparently a lot of others) HORRIBLE motion sickness and headaches. Otherwise… it is gonna be a Steam Deck exclusive.

If you think that was a lot of words, you might be illiterate.

Not sure if you are implying that Rockstar are secretly behind the christofacists or what but…

I don’t care if GTA6 sells more copies because of this. I care that they are able to sell any copies at all. None of this shit is new and we as a people ignore it every single time it comes up because it is something niche or something that everyone needs to say they hate (porn).

So let’s take away the stuff people actually want and bring this to a head.

Yeah. My tinfoil on why there hasn’t been a true new Persona game in almost ten years (P5 base was 2016?) is because Atlus et al realized this.

Going back to the same stories but with new content or better graphics lets people rely on nostalgia. Doing something new set in the same high school environment (which is a big aspect of Persona’s themes and motifs) makes all those 30 and 40 year old fans start to question what they are doing with their lives.

Honestly? Good

Nobody cares about “furry shit and incest” or that game about digging through an incel’s computer. Studios will say they stand with artists and freedom of expression all while frantically removing sex scenes and making sure every single dryad is in a three piece suit and the evil lord’s army just roughs people up.

GTA6? That is expected to be a significant chunk of the FY2026 (?) earnings for a LOT of platforms. They’ll care about that. Same with all the studios that were hoping to ride the wave of people who finished GTA and want another game to try.

Its a beloved series for a reason.

That said? It is also basically a genre at this point. Metaphor Refantasio (sp?) is literally “Persona but adults in fantasy land”. And Clair Obscur is a related genre but took a LOT of inspiration from the Personas.

Yes. That is the aforementioned “pulling a Crowdstrike”

But, as I said, stuff like EA actively going through basically every Battiefield since 3 and actively disabling Proton “support” indicates a political aspect to things. And there will still be the same testing surface issues that make live games hesitant to support “Valve and some company say this is fine” for games that make more money than many small nations.