Anti cheat is also necessary if you design your game around micropayments I assume, so not purely a multiplayer issue.

I am ok with that market dying in a fire admittedly..

Not necessarily.

Usually when micro-transactions are present everything is validated server side, Leading to always online games like diablo 3+.

From my understanding kernel level anticheat is to detect things like aimbot, wallhack etc.

Off the top of my head, Genshin Impact is a mostly single-player game with some multiplayer functionality. It uses kernel level anti-cheat to make sure that microtransactions are protected. This driver had a known vulnerability that did not get patched for years and was used by malicious actors: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...

Street Fight 5 did the same thing; it was possible to unlock characters for local play using a trainer. They patched in a rootkit with known vulnerabilities in an attempt to prevent that.

I don't really think that's true. the content is usually in assets and just behind some flag that gets activated via some callout to a store, but there's not active anti-cheat software making sure that you "actually bought the content" in general()

() technically a lot of games have anti-piracy measures that are somewhat active, but they're rarely of the "phone home" variety

> anti-cheat was required for multiplayer.

This is what I can't wrap my head around. Every multiplayer game I ever played on PC had cheaters in it. The anti-cheat stuff seems like it just inconveniences the good guys, and does little to stop the bad guys, so what's the actual point? I play on consoles now, and the fact that there are no cheaters is probably half the reasons why. I've seen video of Battlefield 1 on PC these days. It's comical, as long as it's not happening to me.

I imagine it's similar to the logic behind locks on houses. Thieves still exist, but by making it harder for them, you reduce the chances of them targeting your house. You won't ever reduce that chance to zero, but you can reduce it significantly.

Similarly, I imagine the more effort you have to put in to get through anti-cheat software, the more likely you are you give up and play a different game. There'll still be some people determined enough to bypass it, but that number will be smaller than it would be otherwise.

Fwiw, I don't play these sorts of games, so I have no idea if this stuff is effective, but there's a comment somewhere in this thread saying that Valorant has fewer cheaters than other, similar games, in no small part due to their aggressive anti-cheating measures, so anecdotally it may well have an effect.

Bans come in waves. So they let cheaters cheat for a bit... but they are recording all the programs and processes that everyone is running. Then, once they see the issue as being big enough to warrant action, they ban the highest "80%" of people running the cheat, in the last "3 months" (or whatever time period).

I'm sure there's some magic threshold where they say, "Eh, this kid only had it running for a week, and the account he was running it on was 8 years old, and gosh... we really don't want more customer support calls and complaints. Let's let a few slide." I'm sure there is some sort of "how serious is this offense" algorithm.

Video games have so many cheaters, but it's rare for the accounts to stay active for more than 3-6 months.

But you're right, they should ban faster, and they should do more to stomp out cheating. For people who play by the rules... it seems unjust that they don't ban faster.

One theory is that they time ban waves to increase sales. "Oh sales are down this month, better ban some more folks so they'll re-buy the game with new accounts."

Don't forget, in a lot of games, players buying in-game currency (or items) is what fuels bots / cheating. The game makers need this sort of behavior to keep some percentage of "legitimate" players (the indirect cheaters) happy and on the platform.

I'm sure they have all the math worked out. They ban at exactly the pace needed to maximize profit.

> I play on consoles now, and the fact that there are no cheaters is probably half the reasons why

There are definitely fewer cheaters overall on console but there are more than you may think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC1dcQqCqFc / https://www.cronusmax.com/

That thing might help you with recoil, but it doesn’t see through walls and auto aim.

I'd encourage you to check out Counter-Strike servers which are NOT VAC-secure. Or, well... I don't know how much these servers exist anymore, with matchmaking being so dominant. But back before CSGO, if you joined a server that didn't have VAC enabled, you would have about a 90% chance of it being unplayable due to speedhacking, spinbots, etc. The other 10% was probably still full of people fine-tuning their use of aimbots, wallhacks, etc.