This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn't take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully...... even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope....
Is there any way with steam to verify those player numbers because 0.01% seems very low. Market share is about 3% so I would expect numbers more in line with that. Obviously it's not going to be a one-to-one match up but two orders of magnitude different than from the expected number.
Rust became unplayable on Linux a good few years before the Steam Deck-induced Linux boom. Back then the Linux share was still counted in tenths of a percent, if that.
And from what I've heard they rendered their build all but unplayable a good while before dropping support entirely.
Now they don't even need to maintain their own. The community will fix the issues through Wine and Proton if Valve doesn't do it themselves.
So really, their only excuses are low player count (self inflicted, and at this point companies pulling shit like this is what's slowing adoption probably as much as fear and unfamiliarity) and cheating (which, why would someone build cheats via Linux if most they'd be making them for are using Windows? Which has rampant cheating all on its own, so their solution is bullshit and useless to begin with)
If you actively prevent your players from using Linux, your Linux player numbers will be very low.