That's an incredibly naive perspective. KLA represents a real risk to companies, as something going wrong can crash player computers instead of just game processes; this is a PR nightmare if/when it happens on a large scale. Not to mention the cost of hiring engineers capable of building kernel components in the first place, it's a niche skillset that's not cheap to hire for.
Games companies don't turn to KLA out of laziness, it's out of absolute necessity, especially for games like FPS' where it's impossible to fully secure the game using pure server-side methods. Machine learning has been tried, it's too prone to false positives and misses more subtle cheats that still negativel impact the the player experience. Anti-Cheat used to exist purely in user mode and then, guess what?, cheats moved into the kernel where they couldn't be detected or stopped. Anti-cheat had to follow in order to remain effective.
The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.
We had the best alternative decades ago. Let the community run the servers and ban cheaters while allowing individual servers to form their own culture and community. The obsession with matchmaking and games as a service (requiring publisher run servers) is what painted the industry into this corner.
Note that I like matchmaking, specifically skill based matchmaking, in some games and at some times but completely ending server browsers and community run dedicated servers was a mistake.
I was pretty good at CS:S, semi-professional level. I nevertheless still enjoyed hanging out on public servers with friends. I cannot tell you how often I have just been banned.
Another example: I was an anti-cheat admin in a major league about 20 years ago. I am quite confident a lower double digit percentage of banned players were innocent - it was simply too hard to get enough competent people for doing manual checks (you'd have to be really good at the game yourself to confidently tell what might be intuition and what cant while evaluating pro players with money-prizes on the line).
So while I appreciate that sentiment, and maybe you found THE one community where all that really worked out for you, but it was by no means the "best alternative" from where I am standing.
> The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.
This was a key reason for Valorant's success. Anti-cheat is a necessary evil to make online games fair. I think if someone wants to suggest otherwise, they would need to demonstrate a superior solution. Companies truly do not want to be in the business of messing with your kernel, so if another solution exists—one that is actually superior in cheat detection and prevention—without a kernel extension, they'll do it.
I'll provide another example of why companies would rather not do it unless they have to. Kernel extensions usually require a system restart. Requiring a restart adds a huge drop off point to a conversion funnel and costs the game some amount of players who may have stuck around, and some players, like the ones here who are upset about it, won't even bother because they are outright opposed. Games would gobble up a solution that worked and didn't have that baggage.
> Anti-cheat is a necessary evil to make online games fair.
It may be required for anonymous online matchmaking. That is only one possible type of online gaming model even if the gaming industry wants to pretend that community run servers were never a thing.
I'd believe this if every multiplayer game that doesn't have KLA was just rife with cheaters. Also, why is EA adding KLA to Battlefield 1 almost a decade after release?
I refuse to believe there is only one simple honorable objective when it comes to KLA. I simply do not care if companies can't figure out how to stop cheaters without it. What about our experience? You might complain about cheaters, but what if I can't even play the game because of KLA?
Played plenty of recent MP games on Linux just fine and cheating was never experience breaking.
Until the obviously detectable cheaters like spinbots get INSTANTLY banned, I don't believe for a second they've "tried everything".
If hackers have to limit themselves to behaviour that looks like real skill, it's kind of unimportant to the games community if they're cheating. Cheaters only ruin the experience if they're obvious to the player.
Finally, something like Overwatch in CS, together with paid employees and PUBLIC bans of high paying cheater accounts (including hardware bans) would create a chilling effect, further forcing cheaters into hiding.
Games companies don't turn to KLA out of laziness, it's out of absolute necessity, especially for games like FPS' where it's impossible to fully secure the game using pure server-side methods. Machine learning has been tried, it's too prone to false positives and misses more subtle cheats that still negativel impact the the player experience. Anti-Cheat used to exist purely in user mode and then, guess what?, cheats moved into the kernel where they couldn't be detected or stopped. Anti-cheat had to follow in order to remain effective.
The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.