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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

VMs are normally a better solution for isolation, although with games it's probably better to let them run on the hardware while the sensitive stuff gets its own VMs.

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The problem with VMs is games that require anti-cheat, which from what I've read from user experiences try to detect and prevent VM usage (not sure about Valve's anti-cheat though).

The common ones such as EAC, BattlEye and VAC don't prevent you from running the corresponding games in a VM.

Hmm, as I've seen topics like this[1] for EAC, though a comment from a different result[2] mentions EAC can be configured to optionally block VMs so maybe it varies by game.

> Today, I purchased and installed Dead by Daylight with the intention of playing with some friends, only to start the game and find a message from Easy Anti-Cheat stating that the game "cannot run under a virtual machine."

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/100yqok/bypass_eac_ca...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/blackdesertonline/comments/px0flc/v...

You are right. I've heard similar stories about BattlEye in the past which I assumed might just have been a decision they've reverted since but could've very well been an option up to game devs to enable. Thankfully not many of them do seemingly.

I've been playing only in a VM with GPU passthrough for years now and the online game which made problems was Darktide, but they pushed a fix soon after release to actually allow VMs. I've heard the same from friends using a similar setup.

Still anecdotal, I know, but it seems to be a rather small issue.

If the VM operates under the same privileges than a host, all this does is prevent automated attacks - a savvy attacker can still access the disk image of the guest, in some cases, it might actually be more vulnerable (as disk image access is implicitly a privesc in the context of the VM).

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