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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

> They can just release a Windows native anti-cheat-anti-piracy feature.

Unless it's a competitive game and it's a significant improvement on current anticheat systems I don't see why game developers would implement it. It's only going to reduce access to an already increasing non-windows player base, only to appease Microsoft?

Also in order to circumvent a Windows native version wouldn't that be extremely excessive and a security risk? To be mostly effective they would need to be right down the 0 ring level.. just to spite people playing games outside of Windows?

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Existing anticheat software on Windows already runs in ring 0, and one of the reasons that competitive games often won't work on Linux is precisely that Wine can't emulate that. Some anticheat softwares offer a Linux version, but those generally run in userspace and therefore are easier for cheaters to circumvent, which is why game developers will often choose to not allow players that run the Linux version to connect to official matchmaking. In other words, for the target market of developers of competitive games, nothing would really get any worse if there was an official Microsoft solution.

On the other hand, using an official Microsoft anticheat that's bundled in Windows might not be seen as "installing a rootkit" by more privacy-conscious gamers, therefore improving PR for companies who choose to do it.

In other words, Microsoft would steamroll this market if they chose to enter it.

Also Microsoft closing the kernel to non-MS/non-driver Ring 0 software is inevitable after Crowdstrike, but they can't do that until they have a solution for how anti-cheat (and other system integrity checkers) is going to work. So something like this is inevitable, and I'm very sure there is a team at Microsoft working on it right now.

> just to spite people playing games outside of Windows?

These things are always sold as general security improvements even when they have an intentional anti-competitive angle. I don't know if MS sees that much value in the PC gaming market these days but if they see value in locking it all down and think they have a shot to pull it off, they'll at least try it.

In theory a built in anti-cheat could framework have a chance at being more effective and less intrusive than the countless crap each individual game might shove down your throat. Who knows how it would look in practice.

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