Helldivers might have more to do with preventing people from easily farming super credits versus game integrity.

Yep. I've seen quite a few free-to-play gacha games of the "Dress up your pretty princess in cool clothes and do cute activities in a relaxing, no-stress world." variety that have serious anticheat. There's no leaderboard, no multiplayer, it's totally singleplayer.

Why the serious anticheat? To try to prevent you from cheating your way to possession of all the cool clothes for your pretty princess.

burying the lede here killer. the answer is "we want to get paid"

the cool clothes cost $$$ or are randomally found. 0.0000004% chance to get, or pay money for better odds.

or pay lots of money to just get it.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is also a co-op PvE game that has anti-cheating in it. The most common way people cheat is by fudging then items equipped to their character that slightly alter their stats and abilities. Since the game is rouge-like and all of your character information and equipment you can assign before entering the game is handled locally then all it takes is editing your save file which the game and server have no way of (or makes no effort to) detect.

Also, after a brief period, all of the cheaters disappeared because just repeatedly winning a PvE game get boring.

The best games with anti-cheat have an option to launch without using it, but just restrict what game types you can play. Playing with friends should be allowed without anti-cheat.

It's also bad with games that have been sucked into the live service hell-vortex. I can't fire up a quick game of Madden against the CPU because EA has turned Madden into a multiplayer lootbox casino, so they chuck Linux-blocking anti-cheat on the whole damn thing, single-player and all.

What? Helldivers 2 works just fine on linux for me. Is this just a windows thing?

Not all anticheat fails to work in Wine/Proton.

The super invasive kernel-mode variants (that is, the sort that's in Valorant) flat out fail, and surely always will. It's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that with some others (like Easy Anti Cheat), it's a choice made by the game dev as to whether running in Wine/Proton will be permitted or not.

That's not exclusive to kernel-mode anti-cheats. Even VAC, which is not kernel-mode, doesn't work in Proton: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3225

> That's not exclusive to kernel-mode anti-cheats.

Sure, I didn't intend to suggest that it was. That's one of the reasons I mentioned EAC. Apologies for the confusion.