Depending on the implementation, client side anticheat isn’t needed at all. Take the game Speedrunners for example. There is zero need for the server to do anything other than accept player inputs, process them, and return them to the clients.
So if coded correctly, where the server trusts nothing and does the math itself, it is impossible to cheat while having zero anticheat on the client.
And that’s without there being any additional cost.
Depending on the implementation, client side anticheat isn’t needed at all. Take the game Speedrunners for example. There is zero need for the server to do anything other than accept player inputs, process them, and return them to the clients.
So if coded correctly, where the server trusts nothing and does the math itself, it is impossible to cheat while having zero anticheat on the client.
And that’s without there being any additional cost.
That’s all well and good, but a smash brothers clone is very different to CoD or Battlefield in this regard.
Client side anti-cheat is absolutely needed in FPS/TPS. Without it, server side anti-cheat would have to do far more and quietly be much harder to do.
Those types of games are usually made by AAA studios. They have the resources to do server side anticheat despite it being more involved.
You need both. It’s much easier to detect cheats on the client side, ones that would never get picked up server side.