I grew up as a web developer, and one of the things they hammer home to you is to never trust the client. The end user can tweak and modify their web browser and send data that is invalid or even malicious.
Instead, you’re supposed to validate everything the client sent you when you receive it. To always consider the client hostile, and check that what it wants to do is sensible.
It’s a shame to see the opposite of that mindset from these game studios. They want to ensure that the client is as trustworthy as possible using invasive techniques and trying to restrict people’s ability to use their own computers.
Which sounds fine on paper, but doesn’t really work. Until we live in the world that Microsoft wants where we are only allowed to use software officially signed and approved by Microsoft, people can still run arbitrary code on their devices.
Anticheat binaries can be modified and tanpered with to ignore things. Network traffic can be intercepted. The game could run in a virtual machine with a modified cpu.
It’s annoying to me that these big companies have managed to shift the narrative so effectively to what is effectively the PC equivalent to confiscating water bottles at aorports to give the illusion that they are stopping terrorists.
Google actually tried to push an “anticheat” for Chrome (as far as I know they failed because they didn’t have enough market share to force things). This would allow websites to require you to use Chrome with no extendions.
If that had gone through, I wonder how many people would be mad that they wouldn’t be able to play browser shooters on Firefox or other Chromium based browsers? Would we have these same kinds of posts where people were arguing over whether Firefox “has more cheaters”?
The important question to ask isn’t “would Linux allow more cheaters?”, it’s “why isn’t the modern games industry actually doing anything to stop cheaters?”.