i'm here to tell you, anecdotally at least, that it is quite often that easy.

These mechanisms are looking for certain environmental conditions, not the entire system state.

And for the most part it's the same on KVM.

Yes, unless a game is going with a "proper"/kernel-level anti cheat it likely only does a cursory check. One of my best examples is, years ago, if you had Cheat Engine (and I think OllyDbg) open when launching WoW it would shut down. You could bypass that by editing the window title of CE to something else. Or just launch CE after WoW had loaded.

NVIDIA has/had a hypervisor detection in their drivers to prevent you from using GPU passthrough. It is based on searching for a specific hypervisor ID [1], easily bypassed, I just used "expletiveNvidia" and it worked fine. Also TIL AMD does the same...

In the end most companies are just playing whack-a-mole with simple indicators something "fishy" is going on.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Vi...

Then someone has to investigate it, and make a specific wrapper for this behavior, or, as natives call it, “crack”. Of course, if you have a crack, you won't have the problem (and the developers will also be happy because they won't need to support you).