The video game industry was estimated to be worth about 298.98 billion USD in 2024. 205.1 million Americans play video games (there are over 342 million Americans). Needless to say, gaming is a regular part of many of our lives: we use games to socialize, to relax after a hard day at work, to challenge ourselves an refine our skills. It's fair to say that gaming is an essential part of many of our lives.
I mourn the transition from “physical game cartridge I own & can play on an airgapped machine” to “digital asset I own(?) that lives on a remote server”
Random thought on copyright techniques: Spyro3 on PS1 had some crazy innovations worth reading about
When part of the threat model includes “I don’t want them to see what I do in the game, but I want the game to let me play the game” this seems like a fundamental problem with the gaming system and privacy in general.
Remember how dumb phones had a resurgence a few years ago? Free business idea: dumb gaming.
It tickles me funny that a man back in my home town who pirates literally all his content is more unknown to the data brokers than me buying a movie ticket a few times a year, or buying a game I was waiting for.
In exchange for not helping to fund more creative works, pirates don’t have to register, terms and conditions don’t apply, their stuff doesn’t delete until they want it to, the government doesn’t know what they are watching….
The closest us honest people get to that is borrowing decades old stuff from the library, and I’m pretty sure whatever software vendor they use vaccums up everything it can.
I don’t really agree, you’re risking malware and most games aren’t sandboxed. You’re better off just finding games that aren’t riddled with invasive crap and getting them legit.
I think Dedicating Gaming Machine can also be considered as an SSD just for gaming. At least, that’s how I see it. tbh you can do a lot with Bazzite/Nobara/Cachy,etc., GOG, DNS, and opensnitch. GOG has DRM free (assumed offline) games and they do have some big name games there like Uncharted and god of war.
For Steam make a new account, each time you get new hardware (to escape from matching exact hardware to account).
It’s easy to be private if you only play single-player games. I see privacy personally as a “single player lifestyle”, so gaming while maintaining privacy seems to follow suit.
ProtonDB is a great resource to see how games are doing on Linux (with proton of course).
The following is a post install script I have used for bazzite before (read through before use):
#!/bin/bash
#
# Harden Bazzite
#
# Licensed under CC BY 4.0 - Attribution 4.0 International
# See more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
current_time=[$(date +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%N%z')]
hostname="localhost"
if [ "$EUID" -ne 0 ]
then echo "Please run as root: \`sudo -E bazzite_hardening.sh\`"
exit
fi
echo $current_time "Setting hostname to $hostname"
hostnamectl set-hostname $hostname
echo $current_time "Updating Machine ID to Whonix ID"
echo "b08dfa6083e7567a1921a715000001fb" > /etc/machine-id
echo $current_time "Installing Mullvad Browser"
cd /home/$USERNAME/Downloads/
wget https://mullvad.net/en/download/browser/linux-x86_64/latest -O mullvad_browser.tar.xz
tar xvf mullvad_browser.tar.xz
rm mullvad_browser.tar.xz
cd mullvad-browser/
./start-mullvad-browser.desktop --register-app
#https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/#system-counting
echo $current_time "Adding double-check for countme variable"
echo "countme=false" >> /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
#https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/#storage-media-handling
echo $current_time "Stopping automount of storage media filesystems"
cat >> /etc/dconf/db/local.d/automount-disable<< EOF
[org/gnome/desktop/media-handling]
automount=false
automount-open=false
EOF
cat >> /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/automount-disable<< EOF
org/gnome/desktop/media-handling/automount
org/gnome/desktop/media-handling/automount-open
EOF
sudo dconf update
#https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Fedora/comments/tatsjs/fedora_dns/
# Secured w/ECS: Malware blocking, DNSSEC Validation, ECS enabled
echo $current_time "Changing DNS to Quad9 - Restart will be done right after"
#Setting first value in network as the main outgoing connection
interface="$(nmcli con | awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=" ";} FNR == 2 {print $1}')"
echo "interface is" $interface
nmcli con mod $interface ipv4.dns "9.9.9.11 149.112.112.11"
nmcli con mod $interface ipv6.dns "2620:fe::11 2620:fe::fe:11"
systemctl restart NetworkManager
Well articulated article! I just wanted to add my experience.
Get the best privacy.