Valve working with devs to get anti-cheat on Steam Machine

Valve says it is working closely with developers to get anti-cheat solutions on the Steam Machine, but ultimately it will be up to the individual third-party teams to make it happen.

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The lack of anti-cheat support is one of the biggest disadvantages of the Steam Machine. Not being able to play big online games like Call of Duty or Battlefield 6 on the Steam Machine will inhibit its mass-market appeal and impact sales potential. Valve is hopeful that developers and publishers will opt to build their anti-cheat systems on SteamOS, but there's no guarantee. That's not stopping Valve from trying to accelerate the process from the backend, though.

In a recent interview with SkillUp, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais gives an update on the current status of how anti-cheat will work on Steam Machine.

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Q. Have you guys done any re-thinking on that approach now that it's going to be a box that's plugged into a TV in somebody's living room accessing some of these games online?

Pierre:

It's been definitely something we think about and there is more reasons to think about it in that environment you're pointing out. There's more reasons that someone would want to play an online game that requires anti-cheat if they have a machine like that compared to something like a Steam Deck.

Definitely it's something that we've been working on. We've enabled all the TPM APIs that game developers would need to build their anti-cheat systems, we've been working with a bunch of developers--the players in the field that you might expect that are doing a lot of advanced anti-cheat stuff on the client side.

We're trying to make sure that we're working together towards something that can be supported. But at the end of the day, I think supporting something like anti-cheat is kind of a constant effort. You have the system, the infrastructure, you're always rolling out updates--there's a lot of active things that you're doing. I think some of that work by nature, because it's so close to the platform, will have to be SteamOS specific.

So I think it'll be something that some game developers or publishers will have to decide at their own rhythm if they want to develop for SteamOS or not. But we've been trying to help in any way we can along the way.

There's some things that have been on our plate for sure, that we've been working on in the background that will make that easier on their side as well.

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Elsewhere in the interview, Pierre indicated that developers were more keen to optimize their games for Valve's hardware as the user base continued to grow, including Steam Deck Verified support and other features.

Perhaps anti-cheat could become one such investment that developers make for their games.

For the work that game developers have been putting into games to make them run better on Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and Frame going forward, we're excited that the type of work that we're seeing being done is actually not porting work, but work that just makes the games better on every platform.

Things like adding different options for control schemes, adding more scalability options for lower-performance machines, improving UI density so it's more legible on small screens or screens that are far away. All of this work is happening right now, and it's getting more games to the Deck Verified finish line.

But all of this stuff will also apply to the Steam Machine and Steam Frame as well, and we're seeing the ramifications of that meaning that the whole Steam catalog is more accessible on any PC and not just our products. We're really excited about that.