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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

I think you could sum up the entire discussion about anti-cheat sort of like this: We're currently at a point where game publishers expect to be able to install rootkits on their customers's PCs. This is seen as basically an industry standard security practice and general requirement for publishing.

I think it's not quite unlike the situation with DRM in movies or ads and tracking on the web. In too many parts of tech, hostile behaviour has been normalised as "standard business practices".

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The problem I see with anti-cheat technology is that editors are also forcing these rootkits on games that can be played solo (either solo exclusively or multiplayer games with solo campaigns).

While I can fully understand being forced to run anti-cheat technology on my PC to play online games, I find it totally unacceptable and unethical to have this kind of software forced upon me for games I exclusively play solo.

I consider myself lucky to not need to worry at all about the financial cost of my hobby, I value gaming so much that I would even pay double for some of the games I played. But installing a rootkit on my PC is out of the question. Personally, until editors accept to treat their honest customers as honest customers (at least the solo players), I will not behave "honestly" and will keep using "alternative" ways to acquire games.

While I'm with you on being against dark patterns and unethical behavior, anti-cheat feels different in that it seems pretty honestly an effort to make the game better for players (the non cheaters, at least). I haven't seen any arguments that anti-cheat is being used in the interests of the company over the user, it's all that people don't like the technology that's required to do this. So I think it's pretty different from DRM which is pretty clearly an interest misalignment.

At the day yes no one likes this software, but people like gaming with cheaters even less. Just like how we don't like being subject to social media moderation, but we dislike spam even more. I think we can't rule out that these companies (in these instances) are trying to give us what we want even if the means are a bit unseemly.

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