In a lot of ways, it’s the lazy way out because they can just shell out to a vendor like BattleEye. Even with in-house solutions like Riot and EA use, they can be developed by separate teams who don’t really need to have any knowledge of how the game actually works.

It’s largely all the same syscalls and access patterns they’re looking for. Process injections work the same no matter what the game is.

Kernel-level access is also in some ways the lazier way to implement it because instead of having an arms race with the cheat developers trying new ways to detect and avoid each other respectively, they just force their anti-cheat module as low in the stack as possible. It’s just also, you know, indistinguishable from a Trojan at that point.

I’m convinced that client-side anticheat is all about security theater. They want the users to know it’s there so the next time they get their asses kicked they’re less likely to cry hacks. And if anyone complains about cheaters in their games, they can point to the anticheat and go “look, it’s not possible, we block cheats at the source.” In that regard, the more obtrusive and noisy it is, the better.

I’m not convinced that it’s any better than doing detection server-side, either purely statistically or through some machine learning model. If a cheater isn’t any better than an average player, I honestly don’t give a shit that they’re cheating. At that point, it’s effectively an accessibility tool.

And yet somehow they’ve been getting closer and closer to CoD every single release.

As of writing, it’s getting review bombed mainly for long queue times and streamers getting preferential treatment.

One review says it worked on Linux/Proton during the beta and the devs even demoed it on the Steam Deck (citation needed), but they introduced a kernel-level anticheat right before launch and now it doesn’t work.

Another reviewer is saying the anticheat made his Windows BSOD.

May be worth letting the dust settle on this one.

Seems like a positive feedback loop:

1. Netflix creates show that’s pretty good
2. People watch it
3. Netflix takes too long to release season 2
4. People forget show exists, stop watching
5. Netflix drops a season years later
6. No one watches it because they forgot what happened in season 1 and Netflix shows are so serial that you have to know what happened
7. Netflix cancels show due to low viewership
8. Fans of the show feel jilted and slam Netflix on social media
9. Rinse and repeat