which developers can activate some sort of device whitelist to allow the Steam Deck with SteamOS.

The whole "kernel anti-cheat" PC multiplayer thing is just an endless game of whack-a-mole that I don't want to get involved with. End of the day, PC hardware is open, and that's a big part of what's nice about it. With open hardware, though, comes the fact that you can change things, and one thing that people love using that ability to do is to cheat. And with multiplayer games, a cheater can ruin the game for a non-cheater. Trying to figure out some way to make an open PC be locked down is hard, unreliable, and ultimately just making the thing act like a bad console. If there's enough demand for it and money in it, a game developer can keep playing that whack-a-mole, but it's never something that can really be permanently fixed all that well.

Consoles are really good at blocking players from doing things that will make the playing field not level. They are in a good position to stop fiddling with memory, or modifying game binaries, or extracting information that should be hidden and showing it to the player. They can restrict people from getting a controller or a keyboard or a mouse or a fancier GPU or whatever that will give Player 1 a pay-to-win edge over Player 2. That's a desirable characteristic if you goal is to have players playing against each other on even footing.

I really think that the long-term, realistic route to deal with this is for PC games to shift towards single-player, or at least away from competitive multiplayer.

It used to be that PC multiplayer games were rare. There were two major changes after this that made PC multiplayer games a lot more viable:

• The Internet came along. Now anyone can communicate with anyone in a very wide area cheaply.

• People moved off POTS analog modems. This not only provided a lot more bandwidth, but slashed latency

a POTS modem inserted a bit over 100 ms of latency. A tenth of a second of latency at the hardware level was a serious issue for some genres, like first-person-shooter games, so getting rid of that solved a lot of problems.

Okay, great. That unleashed a flood of multiplayer games. And making a game multiplayer solves a lot of problems:

• Writing good game AI that stays competitive against a human is hard. Humans are pretty good at that.

• Humans are good at coordinating, so any cooperative games have humans doing well with humans.

• Some people specifically want to play against other people, to spend time with them.

The problem is that I don't think that there is going to be any future big jump like that improving the multiplayer competitive situation. Those two big jumps are pretty much the end of the road in terms of making multiplayer significantly better. Maybe it's possible to see some minor gains via better predictive algorithms to shave off perceived latency, though I don't think that there is going to be game-changing stuff there. Maybe someone can improve on matchmaking. But I think that we've seen all the big improvements that are going to come.

And multiplayer comes with a host of problems that are very hard to fix:

• By-and-large, realtime multiplayer games cannot be paused. There are a few exceptions, mostly for games with a small number of players. This is a real problem if you, say, have a kid and want to play a game and in the middle of it you hear something smash in the next room and the kid start screaming. Real life is not friendly to people requiring uninterrupted blocks of time.

• People don't always do things that are fun for other people. Griefing, spawn-camping, cheating, whatever. Even minor stuff like breaking out of character making the game less-immersive. You can try to mitigate that with game design, but it's always going to be an issue. Human nature doesn't change: humans come firmly attached to human foibles.

• Multiplayer games stop being playable at some point, when they no longer have enough players. Often before that, if they have centralized servers operated by the publisher

which is almost universally the case today

and the servers get shut down.

• Even with modern networks, latency and flaky connectivity is a factor for real-time games. For people living in remote areas, it's particularly annoying.

• For multiplayer competitive games, one can only win at some given rate; for a player to win against a human, that other player will lose. I'd wager that that rate is most-likely not the optimal rate for game enjoyment. If a player isn't competing against humans, that constraint on game designers goes away.

On the other hand, while it is hard to make sophisticated game AI, hard to make it as good as a human...there are also no real fundamental limits there. I am confident that while we are not there today, we can make an AGI comparable to a human, and that for the simpler problem of making game AI, it's possible to make much-less sophisticated AIs that solve many of the problems that humans do in games. That's expensive to do on a per-game basis -- game AI is hard -- but my guess is that most games have a fairly-similar set of problems to solve, that it's probably possible to abstract a lot of that, have "game AI engines" used in many games that solve a lot of those problems. We've done that with graphics engines and physics engines; there was a point where having the kind of graphics and physics that we do in many games was prohibitively expensive too, until we figured out how to reuse a lot of work from game to game. And improvements in that game AI is a ratchet: it's only going to get better, whereas human nature isn't going to change.

I'm not saying that multiplayer games are going to vanish tomorrow. But I think that the environment that we're going to see is going to differ from the one that we've seen from maybe the 1990s to the 2010s, where technological change specifically dramatically relatively improved the situation for multiplayer games

I think that there's going to be a continued trend towards the situation relatively-favoring single-player games.