Whelp…I’m out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)
Kernel mode anti-cheat guarantees I will never buy your game. Not even as a gift for someone else.
Assurances like “we will never abuse this power” are laughably unrealistic, and even if they defied the history of humanity and somehow turned out to be true, that issue is made irrelevant by additional realities:
- The risks come not only from corporate abuse of power, but also from vulnerabilities in their code that will eventually be exploited by third parties.
- Beyond the risk of nosy corporations snooping on users’ private information, there are major security risks. An exploit at the kernel level means game over for the integrity of your entire system, all the data on it or passing through it, and every other system accessed from it. Bank accounts, for example.
- Client-side anti-cheat is conceptually wrong thinking and doomed to fail. Even at the kernel level, it’s an arms race. Cheaters will find ways to weaken or circumvent it (such as running cheats on an external device that captures game video and generates input events) or even defeat it completely.
I guess this incredibly invasive and fundamentally flawed attempt to manage cheating might be acceptable to someone whose computer is used for nothing else but playing that game… —shrug— …but for me, it’s a hard nope.
Not only that, but cheating isn’t exactly a huge problem in this genre, so it’s a heavy handed solution already and one that’s even less necessary to consider.
This likely has less to do with cheating and more to do with making sure players use the game shop, whether it’s blocking third-party skins or bots that automate currency grinds.
I feel like even Valve Anti-Cheat can handle that level of concern though, no?
