Comment by observationist

Pirate everything. Stop feeding beasts and they have no power.

The idea that you need intrusive surveillance in order to make games fair is absurd. If you need fair games, you need referees and moderation, which means you need to train and pay competent people and establish open and transparent rules and tools. You can also give your refs latitude, so if someone is obviously cheating, they have the power to do something about it. You should also require and implement publicly transparent and auditable actions with recourse for players to prevent abuses of power.

That's expensive. It's much easier to create a terms of service with vague guidelines, implement a totally intrusive, absurdly invasive rootkit that does some bare minimum scanning for known cheats and patterns, which establishes an arms race and provides bad actors a nice little point of ingress when the responsible company inevitably fails to protect their users competently.

Just like media platforms, if you cannot moderate at the scale at which you're operating, then it shouldn't be legal to operate at that scale.

People should stop giving money to companies that don't deserve it. No game is worth sacrificing your integrity for. "Just trust us, we know what we're doing" is a huge red flag, and it should be criminal to do what they do.

AI refs are going to be a very real possibility in the near future that can be just as fair and competent as humans, so the "necessity" for rootkits won't be a valid argument for much longer. It'll still be expensive, but multiplayer gaming fairness shouldn't ever serve as a reason for nuking privacy.