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by drbawb 896 days ago
Not sure I share this opinion, I game on a combination of Linux w/ a Windows 11 VM every day. I'm only really aware of two titles that are actively user-hostile with anti-cheat: Rainbow Six Siege and Valorant. Thankfully I'm not interested in playing either of those. I definitely will not run them, out of principle, unless they reverse their stance on considering a VM to be cheating.

The hoyoverse titles used to detect VMs, but it seems to have calmed down. (I was able to try Honkai Star Rail with no obfuscation effort on my part.) NVIDIA stopped caring about VMs in their GPU drivers a few years ago. FatShark almost made the anti-VM mistake with the new Warhammer 40K Darktide anti-cheat; I refunded the title during early-access and told them why. They reversed course before launch and that also works in a VM. - I've played many Blizzard properties (but not WoW) in a VM as well, though they tend to hate networked storage, for reasons I don't yet understand. (Had to setup iSCSI because my CIFS share over 10Gbit/s paravirtualized NIC was "not good enough", I guess.)

Windows runs in a Hyper-V VM by default now, anyways, so "running in a VM" as a heuristic is of questionable utility to me. (It's how the "Core Isolation" feature is provided.) The real irony is I can't even use the VM to cheat, anyways. The guest's memory is encrypted by default. Modifying it, or even reading it, from the host-side would be prohibitively painful. I guess a VM would perhaps obfuscate emulated/scripted inputs, but I use real devices, and a real USB hub on the guest anyways, because the latency and functionality of the emulated HIDs is awful.

Thankfully Steam is very pro-consumer: if a title I purchase does not run in the VM, or on Linux via Proton, it gets instantly refunded. The nice thing is it is actually in Valve's interest financially to push back on these devs: both to prop up the value of the SteamDeck, and to stop people like me from getting refunds.