Because if I can just load my own driver before you load your anti-cheat driver it significantly lowers the difficulty of defeating the anti-cheat. Whoever gets into ring0 (or below) first usually 'wins'.

So for example Valorant's anti-cheat leverages a hypervisor which is always-on, and then an additional client which runs when you launch the game.

The situation is similar with the ESEA counter-strike client.

I just refuse to play games with measures like that. Especially given the fact ESEA got caught deploying a bitcoin miner with their client.

These games always have cheaters anyway, so what am I giving up all that privacy and security for?

The difference is that the price of developing cheats goes up when you need to defeat these measures, and when that happens it means fewer players in the 'cheat for sale' market. There will still be cheaters but much less doing it just for competitive play online. At that point the developer can just learn your business and go after you legally, like Activision has been doing for the past 10 or so years[0,1].

0: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-30-prominent-chea...

1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160705/09363534897/check...

> Because if I can just load my own driver before you load your anti-cheat driver it significantly lowers the difficulty of defeating the anti-cheat. Whoever gets into ring0 (or below) first usually 'wins'.

This is entirely unrelated to Epic Games Store wasting 5% of my CPU when it's running. I can just load my own driver before I launch the Epic Games Store.

It could also just be a bug in the launcher: https://www.pcgamer.com/a-bug-in-the-epic-games-store-launch...