Also, cheating really is so bad that most people will accept it anyways.
Unfortunately we don't have a software nor user culture of, for example, having an isolated partition for our important files and an isolated partition for "I just want to play some games" -- You can imagine how streamlined and effortless and by-default this could be in an alternate universe where it was a top priority.
So people can really get hosed under catastrophic conditions like the anti-cheat becoming a remote backdoor for an attacker. I think this is really where people are let down by modern computing.
I feel this is the part people miss. It's true that it's a cat and mouse game and these end up still being worked around, but cheating has crippled games before.
Search any popular game + "cheaters" and find thousands of posts complaining about these people.
Even if you explain this stuff to people, and admit it's still not foolproof, they will embrace it.
I think we see this mistake a lot in the tech bubble. People assume if only people knew their data was being used they'd be outraged, except if you give them a choice between that and paying for stuff they'll always take giving away their data.
People just don't care that much about the digital "realm". Their online presence, their "digital rights", to them it's all ethereal and a lot of the few who are even aware of this stuff assume the fight is lost anyways, further whittling down the number of people who care.
Facebook is the privacy boogeyman these days, jokes about Zuckerberg are in no short supply.
Yet if you told people you can pay $9 a month and Facebook never needs your data ever again except host it for you, they'd say no. In fact they might be insulted you had the audacity to ask for such a thing. You could ask for $1 and they'd still say no.
It's just the same way they don't value their digital presence, they don't value digital goods and services.
They'll pay $6 every morning for the same cup of coffee worth 30 cents of ingredients and 5 minutes of work, but balk at the idea of an app asking for 99 cents for a lifetime of development work.
I'm not saying that from a place of bitterness to be clear, it's just what I've found to be the inconvenient reality of things.
We are in a weird situation with PC gaming. PCs have always been a hackers friendly platform. Both Counterstrike and DOTA started as mods. Skyrim is more of a platform than a game now. Of course, it also means cheating, but it wasn't a big deal back then. Cheaters were just shunned, or sometimes encouraged, depending on the context. No big money at stake, no big deal.
But now, we want a standardized platform for high stakes competitive play, so why not bring back consoles. They are more than powerful enough for this, and you can hook up a keyboard and mouse if you want.
This is not actually the case. It's part of what makes Doom's aiming for (and, with Doom eternal actually hitting) 60fps an exception. Most AAA games (including competitive games like COD) prioritize visuals over frame rate, and so they are typically aiming for 25-30 FPS.
Also, a number of graphical workloads are still bound by the CPU - such as occlusion culling.
It may be unwinnable, but it is "mitigateable". It is much better to have your game ruined once a week by a cheater instead of 5 times a day. It can be a perfectly reasonable trade off if the game is important to you.
They want to play the game.
> Are they aware they are giving away keys to the kindom wrt the OS/computing environment integrity just so game studios can take part in an unwinnable cat and mouse chase with cheaters?
They are aware that even if cheaters will always exist, they accept that the anti-cheating measures will stop most people from cheating. As for giving away the keys to the kingdom, everyone already accepts that from Microsoft, a company they apparently trust. Why wouldn't they accept that from another company they trust?
> Also why does Microsoft or AV products allow this without giant "you are giving away root on your box" warning signs?
Because people didn't like that, they were mocked for it, and people became numb to the requests. So they still have warning signs, they are just toned down.
The only plausible attack scenario is if you steal my computer while I'm logged into my KeePassX. It has all my passwords visible. But that session times out as well.
Riot installing a kernel module is more like the latter.
Just request a password reset and change it to whatever you'd like.
Most platforms are edging towards sandboxing applications, with OS X app store, UWP, and the various Linux snap/flatpak/appimage etc things. Web apps and iOS/Android have their own tings.