Palworld continues to be an incredible success seeing a 24 hour peak player count of 527,994 but cheating is causing problems, so the developers plan to address it with new anti-cheat.
Palworld is adding external anticheat, but it will only be required for official servers. Community servers, single player, and coop will have it be optional.
We don't know yet if the anticheat will be compatible with Linux yet, but the options to not use it means that it shouldn't be too disruptive either way.
Basically, just official servers will require anticheat, so worst case you can run your own.
Not the point of the article, but this is nice and reasonable:
This emerging "Palworld has lost X% of its player base" discourse is lazy, but it's probably also a good time to step in and reassure those of you capable of reading past a headline that it is fine to take breaks from games. You don't need to feel bad about that. Palworld, like many games before it, isn't in a position to pump out massive amounts of new content on a weekly basis. New content will come, and it's going to be awesome, but these things take a little bit of time. There are so many amazing games out there to play; you don't need to feel guilty about hopping from game to game.
You can thank the completely obscene financialization of everything for that. Suits don't care about making things people enjoy, they care about making things that generate money. Skinner box microtransaction mechanisms etc. are just a result of that – many games aren't made to be fun, they're made to make you pay
Yeah, I don't think it's sustainable for most games to provide enough new content to keep playing them forever. It's a much healthier content cycle for both devs and users to play other games once you've completed the existing content and lost interest. Personally I don't even usually play through larger single player games without taking long breaks. As soon as I start to feel fatigued with a game I'll switch to another title in my backlog for awhile, and then return a few days or weeks later to finish the first game.