(I apologize in advance, this post’s a bit of a rant…)
I’ve been looking into gaming on VMs, with gpu passthrough and such.
The tools seem to be in place, from what I’ve seen performance-wise you can play basically anything virtualized. The issue seems to be anti-cheat in multiplayer titles.
I get the idea behind anti-cheats not being fond of VMs (technically, someone could be using the hypervisor → vm separation to sneak some cheats into the game), but a straight up carpet block on all vms seems very harsh. I get that for heavily competitive titles it makes sense, but other games that I would want to play (Sea of Thieves, Helldivers 2, etc.) often block vms too.
Now I’m not here to argue about it being overkill or fine, what I’ve been wondering is whether there’s any hope on the horizon. It’s pretty hard to find info on this topic (it’s still pretty niche), and while linux gaming has winedb and protondb and there’s “are we anti-cheat yet“ for anti-cheat compatibility, apart from some 4y/o reddit threads there doesn’t seem to be anything of that sorts for vm gaming.
Even stuff like shadow pc, making vm gaming plug-and-play, don’t help convince the developers to stop removing vm support from their ACs. For example I was trying to set up Sea of Thieves on a vm. It turns out the game used to work like that, until a few years ago they just blocked vms, without any specific reason (anti-cheat presumably).
What are your thoughts? Should I (when playing on vms):
Just limit my expectations to only singleplayer games, with an occasional multiplayer title that works (a reason to celebrate)
Hope and wait, while following no. 1 (assuming there’s a chance for change)
Fight the anti-cheat (hide the fact that im using vms with different techinques - risking permabans)
I’ve never used shadow PC, but the concept and its relative popularity? [1] makes me think they should bother supporting it given the possibility, especially for non-competitive stuff…
but this thread is a perfect example of letting anticheat have their way - I’m not sure if anyone is still running VRC through a VM in the current year as a result. I for sure no longer can, and my old Windows gaming VM used most masking techniques as far as I remember…:
I also wish I could still play Apex on Linux (through still through VM) but alas…
no idea exactly how popular it is but I feel like it’s at least decently popular… ↩︎
But even without the anticheat, I would not go with a VM. Gaming is complicated, adding another layer of complexity by running it in a VM is asking for trouble. Unless you use passtrough, but then what do you even gain to begin with? A Hypervisor and a Gaming PC have fastly different hardware needs. Not only is putting it in a AIO asking for trouble, it is also probably not even cheaper.
Why are you asking me what games you should play lol?
If you are a sweat into competitive multiplayer shooters or a gambling addict playing gatcha games, you won’t be satisfied with single player titles.
The decision on risking a ban or not comes down to you as well. Can you afford to lose the account? Can you easily make another account or is it linked to some form of id or credit card that can permaban you as a person?
Both of these run perfectly fine under Proton, and have since launch, so why even bother with a VM?
Sea of Thieves is even Steam Deck verified.
So before you ask if there’s “hope for VM gaming”, maybe you should ask yourself why you want to bother with a VM at all?
This isn’t 2018 where passthrough was the hot new shit because it was the only thing that worked. These days games pretty much just run from day 1, if not with the default Proton then more than likely with Proton Experimental (which is basically just wine-staging++). You’re not gaining anything from a VM, if anything there’s a good chance you won’t be able to play some titles in a VM that you can via Proton because the Linux EAC runtime was whitelisted by the developer.
I get your point, I actually play through Proton on my main pc, without issues. The thing is that i have proxmox hypervisor which runs a few workstations + some other stuff, and i was thinking about using the vms to host “lan parties” - except with games like SoT (so technically not lan, but you probably get the idea). This approach would save me from having to buy and setup multiple physical pcs.