The irony is that EAC doesnt stop cheaters at all.
I look at EAC as being very analogous to a virus scanner, very easy to bypass if you know what you're doing, but good at catching the common and soon-to-be common threats. It also puts up enough roadblocks to make some novice attempts at cheating inconvenient at least.
Source: I deal with all the anti-cheat stuff (including EAC) on a semi-popular multi-player game. I can verify that it does make a very tangible difference to our player base in terms of the number of cheaters they are exposed to on a per match or per session basis.
Generally the legitimate commercial cheat developers offer status pages detailing any of their cheats that are currently detected and offer additional tools to do things like bypass hardware ID detection if you did get banned in the past.
Maybe I'm clueless but as I understand it some of these shooters (e.g. PUBG) are games that you pay for. If one of these commercial cheats gets detected by EAC isn't the result a permaban of your paid for account? And then you have to buy the game again and make a new one, if that's possible at all? Seems like that would be a serious deterrent, although obviously it won't stop everyone. (Encountering a cheater once out of every ten matches is probably acceptable. Encountering one in every other match probably isn't.)
So yes, that's a deterrent but not for those willing to pay a price equal to the game for monthly access.
Is there still cheating in console players? Maybe with jail broken devices? Do these companies really have to think about cheating with consoles? Do you think the eventual future of these kind of games is some sort of locked down console-like system, which is what apple seems to slowly be going to with their hardware?
Fortnite, Rust, and Fallguys being the most obvious.
There's people selling subscription cheats with money back guarantees against detection.
The only cheats that still plague Dota are scripts that perform tasks automatically, such as disabling an opponent as soon as they're visible (beyond human ability), and those are taken care of by heuristics[1] and a community-voting-based 'overwatch' system in CS:GO and Dota 2[2].
0: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
That isn't possible in real world for every type of competitive gameplay; trade-offs need to be made. Even games you list are not "zero trust" - things like looking direction are left to the client because of the latency.
Moreover, it's not enough. What's also needed is a hardware chain of trust for input devices. On-device cryptographic signing of mouse events would be sufficient and would guarantee that input comes from a fair play-compliant device.
SGX for human inputs. What can go wrong?
Still, it's the most logical step, and it would probably happen in several years, after Microsoft started demanding TPM 2.0. Valorant already requires TPM to be enabled on Windows 11 to run.
By the way, A4Tech has on-device DRM for more than a decade, they are using it to stop people pirating their software. Which is, ironically, designed for cheating.
My position is s/"a super-privileged, encrypted, and isolated enclave in the main CPU memory that can be used for anything"/"a failed experiment in computer pseudoscience".
And the nightmare scenario I imagine is a more lubricated path to framing political dissidents by forging attestations that they were searching for child abuse imagery or some similar scenario.