this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Yeah, well, the answer to that conundrum is called a PS5.
If "as good as it can be" means competitive games are full of cheats then "good as can be" isn't good enough. Back when Windows wasn't good enough in this way PC gaming was a smaller slice of the pie overall.
Games having access to everything i do on my pc is sheer lunacy. Let the devs sanitize their fucking inputs and not give client information the player shouldn't have access to. Anti cheat has always been an arms race, nothing, and that does include your kernel anti cheat, will ever completely stop cheaters.
"Completely" is not the goal. Consoles aren't "completely" cheat free, either.
The goal is to make cheating hard enough that the average twelve year old can't easily do it or conspicuous enough that you can ban them when they do.
Because at that point most players will go from encountering multiple cheaters per game to encountering a cheater every many games, so the game looks like a mostly fair thing with a few outliers as opposed to an absolutely unplayable mess.
And since cheaters and hackers tend to flock to whatever is popular, particularly if they're monetizing their cheating in some form, the more popular the game the more of an interest they have in a secure-enough environment.
If you can't get that on PC they will focus on consoles. If you can't get that on Linux they will focus on Windows.
Well, hey, if there is an easy way that is just as secure and is hardware and OS agnostic I thoroughly recommend you go ahead and develop it. I hear there's good money in it.
Or is your proposed scenario that every single vendor of anticheat software working today is not only deliberately avoiding the use of equally good non-kernel level Windows anticheat but also deploying deliberately inferior, less secure Linux anticheat when they could deliver a solution just as good as the Windows alternative? How do you think that works?
Yeah, so the problem with that is you're typically not building a security platform with a game on top, you're building a game. The scope of the issue is not the same for Fortnite or LoL than for... I don't know, Fatal Fury City of the Wolves, if we're getting topical.
Especially in a multiplatform game where the PC is not your primary target and your targeted consoles have a semblance of platform integrity it is not unreasonable to expect the platform to handle at least the basics. And hey, if Windows gives you that through a third party service that's resources you can put in... you know, the game part of the game.
That's not being lazy, that's the second law of thermodynamics. Resources are limited, from developer time to server time (which goes up if you can't offload literally anything to the client).
You're more likely to have me meet you in the middle if we agree that there probably should be a middle ground where the layer of security that is now being offloaded to a third party service having kernel-level access should instead be handled by the OS. I don't know if that's better or worse, but it certainly isn't as weird and scary as having a bunch of mid-sized vendors have crazy access to people's computers just so they can play games semi-functionally. But to bring this back to the original argument, that sounds like something you're at best going to get from Microsoft. Linux being what it is, that isn't an option and is not going to become one.