Exactly 20 years ago I was both a competitive CS player and I also liked reverse engineering so I was somewhat interested in the cheating community and even programmed a custom injector and cheat for CS (it was surprisingly easy if you knew a bit about Windows APIs).
Cheats were a problem. Not even a nascent problem, but already established. Bad enough that VAC was released in 2002, Punkbuster in 2000...
In competitive gaming you cannot just find a stable friends group to play against: you need competition, and a diverse one. We somewhat palliated this by physically playing in LAN, but that still limits to a radius around you and it's cumbersome when you can just find an opponent online (we had manual matchmaking on IRC before modern matchmaking existed).
The problem is that cheating can be very subtle if done correctly. The difference between "that guy is better that me" and "that guy can see through walls" is pretty much undetectable through non-technical means if the cheater is not an idiot. This poisons the competitive scene.
Competitive gaming is huge. It was big back in the day but now it's a monster. Just check the largest categories on Twitch: LoL, TFT, WoW, CS, Valorant...
Competitive gaming cannot possibly be huge. Like literally it is impossible for 99% of gamers to be competitive in any meaningful sense (if you play a game with 1M players and are in the top 1%, congrats, there are 10,000 people who are better than you. You are still unremarkable). It never was huge; it was just a niche you were in. There's massively more people that are just playing the game too blow off steam.
People play competition sports. They except no, or minimal amounts of cheating. Your personal feelings about it don't matter. The kid that plays basketball with 12 years olds on saturday mornings has the right to not have to deal with cheaters, and it doesn't matter if he's in the top .0001% or a shitty player that cannot distinguish his hands from his ears.
Have a quick look at the ladder on Counter Strike, or Faceit, or ranked play on League of Legends/Valorant/Whatever: it's not a niche. These games requiring kernel AC no matter the type of play is another subject, but people play to compare themselves to other, massively.
The kid that plays basketball with 12 year olds on Saturday mornings has the right to just go use the court at the park without being strip searched and drug tested because it's just a game and he's there to have fun. He actually does not have some right to demand no one else cheat, or even that they use the court to specifically play with some established rules. If other people are there playing HORSE or "what time is it Mr Fox", that's fine.
People who get intensely serious about 12 year olds playing basketball because their kid will be in the NBA some day so everyone needs to take the game very seriously so their kid can practice have rightly always been mocked. The entire point is to have fun.
I've played in Friday night sports leagues where people were drinking during the tournaments (and sometimes that's the point, c.f. sloshball). There are absolutely tons of people that do not take even the "competitions" seriously, and even more that aren't even serious enough to join a league.
Video games being something people play at home, I'd probably be surprised if there weren't more people that regularly play any given esports title under the influence of marijuana or alcohol than there are those who take it as a serious thing[0].
On competitive coding, Advent of Code removed the global leaderboard exactly because "people took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest".
Congratulations on living in a country that doesn't take playing sports with integrity I guess. I've been playing handball, soccer, swimming, from age 8+ on, in a club. Every single saturday game was taken seriously by players. Yes, we fucked around on other games, but competition has always been on every player's mind. If you don't want the pressure of competition, you just tell the coach, and you're not put in for those games.
And no, it's not "parents who think their kid will be in the NBA", it's that children who register in a club want to play competitively. On a country of 70 million, we have about 5 million registered players in different sports, the majority of which take integrity to heart.
[0] A poll on a subreddit, on a dead game with absolutely zero serious competitive scene does not count as "serious research". Yes, players play shitfaced also. The vast majority do not queue for competitive games and just fuck around in normals. Whether that's on modern games with dedicated queues for comp play, or games with dedicated leagues like ETF2L, Faceit and others.
It invalidates the idea that we need to take it seriously and have locked down computers with remote attestation to play games. People who take games seriously are a very small niche. You are in a bubble if you think otherwise.
This is like saying we need to institute drug testing at all parks to play football. Cheating in sports is a problem that very few players are concerned with. Caring about who wins isn't even common. Most are just kicking a ball around with their mates.
Those players can have their own solutions. They should recognize they are a tiny bubble and not insist the other 999,000 players need the same.
And they don't even need it all the time either. I did once participate in a CS:S tournament, so I guess I was "competitive", but half the time I was on gun game or ice world or surf maps. My friends and I played normal Warcraft 3 against each other, but otherwise I pretty much only played custom maps, which were apparently popular enough to spawn an entire new genre. I never ran into problems queueing for something like preschool wars or wintermaul. When we did queue for ladder sometimes it was like 10 minutes to find a match.
To your earlier point about e.g. Valorant: my mom invited me to play on weekends with her and my sister. I know my mom is 0% competitive. This was not some serious thing. I couldn't play with them because I'm not going to buy another computer just to run it. That's the absurdity here.
I have been watching this thread and you are triple downing on a point that you have no real experience with. Competitive e-sports is a real thing. There are e-sports arenas. (How are people even arguing this on HN?)
The International (a DOTA 2 competition) has like $40m in prizes. EWC in 2025 was $70m. 99.6 million people watched the League of Legends World Championship final. And we're not even talking about the millions of dollars of sponsorship involved.
That's great your mom isn't competitive in Valorant, but massively irrelevant. It's like me saying "I play flag football with friends, there is no competitive football."
Anti-cheat is important because this is how the best players are discovered, this is how they're recruited. If a game is 50%+ cheaters, the game will die... DOTA2 would cease to exist today as a big deal. Same with Valorant.
Aside from competitive gaming, GTA V online makes $1 BILLION in ARR. That would be $0 if the game was flooded with cheaters.
Now this isn't me defending kernel level anti-cheat, I think there are better ways to do it and some games do a great job here.
But man, calling GTA V online and competitive e-sports a "tiny bubble" is like calling the NFL a "tiny bubble".
I didn't say there's no competitive e-sports; I said basically no players are part of it, and that's true. The amount of money around a tournament is irrelevant to the fact that 99.99% of players do not participate in such tournaments.
Millions of people play American football casually vs a couple thousand in the NFL, and football isn't a very popular sport to actually play. We don't need to drug test everyone at the park. We don't need to require everyone to play with official league equipment. Again, >99.9% of football players are not in the NFL. The NFL is a tiny bubble in the world of people who play football.
And it's trivial for e-sports tournament organizations with millions of dollars in prizes to spend $50k on a set of standard, controlled computers to play on. Cheating shouldn't be a problem when money is on the line because the only time a player touches the machine is at the tournament. You use standard league equipment during league games. Otherwise who cares?
As far as I know, GTA V does have cheaters and has since the beginning, so it's apparently an example of how it doesn't matter.
Even so, no game ever is 50% cheaters, or anywhere near that. Even games like Gunz: The Duel where the netcode was so garbage that hits were decided on the computer of the person being shot still didn't have many cheaters. Probably less than 1% of players. The overwhelming majority are just having fun. Cheats are boring after like 5 minutes.
Cheats were a problem. Not even a nascent problem, but already established. Bad enough that VAC was released in 2002, Punkbuster in 2000...
In competitive gaming you cannot just find a stable friends group to play against: you need competition, and a diverse one. We somewhat palliated this by physically playing in LAN, but that still limits to a radius around you and it's cumbersome when you can just find an opponent online (we had manual matchmaking on IRC before modern matchmaking existed).
The problem is that cheating can be very subtle if done correctly. The difference between "that guy is better that me" and "that guy can see through walls" is pretty much undetectable through non-technical means if the cheater is not an idiot. This poisons the competitive scene.
Competitive gaming is huge. It was big back in the day but now it's a monster. Just check the largest categories on Twitch: LoL, TFT, WoW, CS, Valorant...