Doesn't actually stop all cheat developers. If even one person develops and sells a cheat that the kernel-level anticheat doesn't catch, then it stops 0% of cheaters from buying and using the cheat.

It makes the cheats more valuable on the black market. I'm fairly sure the only people cheating in the major competitive games with anticheat are whales and extremely unethical pro players.

If that's the case then why not only have kernel level anti-cheat enforced for the leagues and the tournaments?

Because then a lot more people would cheat outside of leagues and tournaments.

It's much harder to sell a cheat that requires the user to significantly alter their computers boot process. Anti-cheat just exists to inconvenience cheaters enough so that the cheats lose their value.

That's not really true if the exploit requires soldering on to RAM pins and executing on a second, independent machine.

I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it's one-sided. Essentially you are saying "Just trust me bro" on behalf of a self-evaluating company.

I'd argue the potential for abuse is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have, and doesn't have much bearing on the effectiveness of anticheat, but I understand that's not the point you are trying to make.

Sorry, my writing should have been clearer, I put one too many negatives in. :-)

I didn't claim we should trust the company. Whether we can trust the anticheat maker is certainly part of the rigorous evaluation of the tradeoffs I mentioned. My point was that saying "it doesn't stop cheaters" is both incorrect and stifling to a more productive conversation, because it implies anticheat has no value and is therefore worth no risk.

As for me, if Gabe said "now you can opt your Steam Deck in to a trusted kernel we ship with anticheat and play PUBG," I'd probably do it. But that's because I, for better or worse, tend to trust Gabe. If Tencent were shipping it, I'd probably feel differently.

Compare: "I still get spam, therefore all these anti-spam measures are worthless"

It is absolutely the case that there would be more cheating if we turned off the only partially effective systems. We know this because they are regularly stopping and banning people!

People are going to to be upset when it happens but it is absolutely inevitable at some point Steam ships a Steam Deck with hardware based attestation of the OS being a signed version of SteamOS, feeding back to a Steam API, that can be used as the basis of an anti-cheat solution.

And if Valve lets me run that same kernel on my Linux desktop PC, where most of my gaming happens, I'll be tempted to run it there too.