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Comment by rmellow | Hacker News Reader

Windows is a gaming platform, as is Linux in a lesser degree. So not more than already happens, and games can require anti-cheat software to be installed.

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Anti-cheat is cancer and doesn't do much to prevent cheating anyways. The only way to prevent cheating is moderation, but that doesn't "scale" (even though every time you ban a cheater they have to re-buy the game and is actually a net plus)

I don’t agree. I think anticheat CAN do plenty. Many game companies don’t have the resources or care to build entire divisions around anticheat. Hardware bans are extremely effective when done right. Not many games do invasive hardware bans though.

> I think anticheat CAN do plenty.

It can, but usually doesn't do anything but make your system less secure. I'd have no problem with anti-cheat systems, but they by and large don't work.

Of course it scales if you allow dedicated servers run by a 3rd party admin, like TF2 or Factorio or so many games of the past. But most companies these days don't want to give up that control.

That's just the thing, it scales very well if you're only running first party servers for a _paid_ game.

Escape From Tarkov had a big issue with cheaters because they would farm ingame currency, then sell it for real cash (Real Money Trading - RMT). This was literally a job for these people. Everytime they got banned, they just bought another account (~40$) and kept farming. If a support person bans one such person per two hours (at a generous 20$/hr Russian salary), the company literally makes money off of cheating.

I get why Free To Play games have cheater issues (even though for example Fortnite is raking in cash), but for pay to play games, I just don't get it.

It depends on the anti-cheat systems. Some games are significantly easier to cheat in than others for rather obvious reasons. Anti-cheat has a very hard problem in that you're shipping your binary to an obviously-hostile environment where people will do anything and then some to get the upper hand.

If you attended Kernel and Hardware hacking courses at security trainings, you're likely sitting next to either some cheat developers, or some anti-cheat team members.

Aren't most anti-cheat systems basically rootkits? Mandatory anti-cheat sounds like the greater of two evils compared to walled-garden hardware. At least the latter is upfront about what you're getting.

Yes. They're intrusive enough that anti-cheat should really be a Windows feature, if anything.

Stadia implies a lot of work into virtualising PC games. I wonder if there's a world where that same tech could be used to deploy games as local VMs, where "anti cheat" is actually a hypervisor feature.

I hope you're right but I suspect the same anti-cheating measures can't work on PS5 and Xbox because I doubt those vendors give the low level of access required to make such tools work.

When the xbox360 was jailbroken a lot of games were immediately ruined, at least until Microsoft figured out how to ban modded consoles from online play.

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