Comment by Hikikomori
3 days ago
Unfortunately Linux requires zero effter to create cheats on, might as well run no anti cheat. And the root stuff is overblown as user space programs can already read all your files and process memory of that user. How many bother with multiple users?
Not all gamers are playing games where cheating is an issue. It's really only the MOBA Call of Battlefield AAA crowd who care about that. That's not the largest group of gamers, and certainly not the largest market for games.
Fortnite and Call of Duty are consistently the #1 and #2 games every year. The others like GTA, Battlefield, League of Legends and Valorant also have anti-cheat that blocks Linux. It's not a minor issue.
The top game tag by sales [0] is #singleplayer, which obviously doesn't care about anti-cheat.
There's a demographic of gamers who only play the one competitive multiplayer game (such as Fornite or CoD). They don't buy many games, they're not the most lucrative market for game publishers, but they do keep those titles in business. And yes, for them, anti-cheat is important and they're unlikely to move to Linux.
[0] https://games-stats.com/steam/tags/
The push back on kernel level anti-cheat on security grounds has always felt odd to me. If you don't trust them to run kernel level code why do you trust them to run usermode code as your user? A rogue anticheat software could still do enormous damage in usermode, running as your user, no kernel access required.
Being in kernel mode does give the rogue software more power, but the threat model is all wrong. If you're against kernel anti-cheat you should be against all anti-cheat. At the end of the day you have to chose to trust the software author no matter where the code runs.
The concern isn't that the anti-cheat vendor would do something nefarious, the concern is that it opens up privilege escalation exploits.
If malware does get executed in user mode it could take advantage of the anti-cheat kernel module to make the attack even more damaging to the OS.
it isn't about what I allow them run on my computer, it's about what they don't allow me run on my own goddamn computer. you can't run modded biıs, self compiled kernel or unsigned drivers. with secure boot enabled.