Hell, blatant cheaters literally stream themselves cheating and their own communities do not recognize the cheating till the stream makes a mistake and selects the wrong scene. This also means that VAC methods of sending footage to random players is ineffective, as some streamers who are very obviously actually cheating do so in front of tens of thousands of people, and those people do not recognize the obvious cheating happening.

We also know game companies don’t care about cheating, as activision admitted in their lawsuit that they leave cheaters on a safe list so long as the cheaters have any semblance of an audience streaming.

That is absolutely wild, and completely characteristic of Activision.

Do you have a link that I can share with my CoD-playing friends?

It really doesn’t even take that many viewers. Zemie, for example, is a straight up cheater that runs a button activated aimbot and wall hacks. He only averages a couple thousand viewers and is safe listed by a number of game companies.

Truth be told, if the exploiter-class of your game would even consider a kernel-level exploit, your game is fucked from the start. Seriously, go Google "valorant cheating tool" and your results page will get flooded with options. You cannot pretend like it's entirely the audience's fault when there are axiomatically better ways to do anticheat that developers actively ignore.

There plenty of way to mitigate cheating in game, but the game industry is focusing on the ones where they don't bear the cost and only the customer will (and this view is in part due to the model of F2P games, where banning cheater is useless as it doesn't cost them anything to create a new account).

Letting game developer having complete control and spying on the device playing the game is fine in a physical tournament were they provide the device, but it's insanity when it's the user own device in its home.

I'm not really sure I buy this. I can't really give a way that can guarantee no cheating but I know for example games like Genshin Impact run almost all the code (dmg calculation etc) server-side. Perhaps something that's an extension of Geforce Now might be the best "anti-cheat" technically speaking.

But as you are pointing out, forcing client-side intrusive anti-cheat is cheaper, thus this as nothing to do about preventing cheating, but about reducing cost.

Ideally player A shouldn't be networked player B if there is a wall between them but what happens when they're at the edge of the wall? You don't want them to pop in so you need some tolerance. But having that tolerance would also allow cheaters to see players through walls near edges. Or your game design might require you to hear sounds on the other side of the wall (footsteps, gunshots, etc.) which allows cheats to infer what what may be behind the wall better than a person would.

Yes, and you cannot prevent this except in in-person tournament.

Any output send toward the player, even a faint audio queue could be analyzed, and use to trigger an action or display an overlay to the screen, and no amount of kernel-level stuff will prevent that, as you can do this outside of the computer running the game.

You will own nothing and like it.

You can even do this calculation on community-run private server.

Now everything is matchmaking, private servers, live service and that sense of community is gone.

Small communities still exist, it's just that vacant places are now filled with strangers.

Perhaps secure boot by itself isn't enough, but I would imagine it would be a relatively large bump, when combined with a kernel-level anti-cheat. I presume such anti-cheats would e.g. disable the debugger access of game memory or otherwise debugging it, accessing the screen contents of the game or sending it artificial inputs.

What vectors remain? I guess at least finding bugs in the game, network traffic analysis, attempting MitM, capturing or even modifying actual data in the DRAM chips, using USB devices controlled by an external device that sees the game via a camera or HDMI capture.. All these can be plugged or require big efforts to make use of.

VALORANT also adds TPM to the mix alongside SB and a kernel AC and yet is still trivially easy to cheat in as long as you have a driver you can use. Granted, it needs to be signed (=financially unreachable by a big part of the community), but if stubborn enough...

That's akin to saying that, as people want security on the street, mandatory strip search as soon as your exit your home is fair game.

Asking for a result doesn't give a blank-check for all the measures taken toward this result.