Anti-Cheat Software Continues To Be The New DRM In Pissing Off Legit Customers
from the screw-the-customers dept
Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, intrusive kernel-level access issues; the list goes on and on.
Well, if you’ve been paying attention over the last couple of years, anti-cheat software is quickly becoming the new DRM. Access to root layers of the computer complaints, complaints about performance effects, complaints about how the software tracks customer behavior, and now finally we have the good old “software isn’t letting me play my game” type of complaint. This revolves around Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett, whose writing I’ve always found valuable, attempting to review EA’s latest FIFA game.
I have reviewed FIFA in some capacity on this website for well over a decade, but regular readers who are also football fans may have noticed I haven’t said a word about it this year. That’s because, over a month after the PC version’s release, I am still locked out of it thanks to a broken, over-zealous example of anti-cheat protection.
Publisher EA uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which has given me an error preventing me from even launching the game that every published workaround—from running the program as an administrator to disabling overlays (?) to editing my PC’s bios (??!!)—hasn’t solved. And so for one whole month, a game that I own and have never cheated at in my life, remains unplayable. I’ve never even made it to the main menu.
Well, gosh golly gee, that sure seems like a problem. And Plunkett isn’t your average FIFA customer. He’s a professional in the gaming journalism space and has reviewed a metric ton of games in the past. If he can’t get into the game due to this anti-cheat software, what hope does the average gamer have?
He goes on to note that FIFA isn’t the only game with this problem. EA also published Battlefield 2042, which Plunkett notes at least lets him boot into the game menu and allows him to play the game for a few minutes before it freezes up entirely. The same anti-cheat software appears to be the issue there as well.
Now, console gamers may chalk this all up to the perils of PC gaming. But that is, frankly, bullshit. This isn’t a hardware problem. It’s a publisher and software problem.
To be clear, I’m not posting this as some kind of isolated, woe-is-me personal account. FIFA 23’s problems are very widespread, to the point it affected other outlet’s reviews, and in this line of work, across all the games and platforms we make use of, we run into hiccups and errors all the time that go unremarked because, well, that’s just life.
Here, though, I think the cause of the issues being an external thing just makes it so much more annoying. And EA are far from the only ones affecting users with heavy-handed measures. Look at Activision, with a frankly ridiculous mobile phone requirement for its latest games that was walked back on Overwatch, but which remains in place for Modern Warfare 2’s impending launch. It means that huge numbers of people, legitimate customers who wanted to buy the game and play it fairly, will be prevented from doing so because of their…phone plans. Then there’s Bungie, who saw innocent players accidentally banned—an extreme punishment!—earlier this month when their own anti-cheat went awry, while some Apex Legends players were booted for the same reason in August.
Everyone understands why publishers want to use anti-cheat software. Cheating in the online versions of these games takes away from the fun and experience from those who aren’t cheating goons. But when the cure is worse than the disease, which obviously is the case when the anti-cheat software simply breaks the game for paying customers, then it should be obvious that this strategy isn’t working.
Put another way, there’s certainly cheating going on in these games, but it seems like the anti-cheat software is the one cheating customers out of the games they bought.
Filed Under: anti-cheat software, cheating, customer experience, drm, easy anti-cheat, video games
Comments on “Anti-Cheat Software Continues To Be The New DRM In Pissing Off Legit Customers”
This could be my shocked face but this is just another unfinished broken thing shoved out the door that they might get around to fixing in 3 or 4 months…
But good news!! We stopped people from cheating… by making our game uplayable for a majority of players!
Re:
“just another unfinished broken thing”
Here’s the thing – anti-cheat software and DRM are both broken by design, there is no fixing it.
The problem is that both are intended to get in the way between otherwise working software, and break it under certain conditions. Sometimes, those conditions are set correctly, or the checks are faulty, but the very purpose of them is to break the game.
They could be better at detecting whatever conditions they use to determine whether or not they break the legally purchased software you have, but by their very nature, their existence is broken software.
Yet, it always has to be stressed – people who actually pirate and who actually cheat will probably not suffer any consequences, as those copies route around the problem by excising the software that breaks the game.
Re: Re: Anti-cheat can *ALSO* break ADA compliance...
In the competitive AAA videogame genre, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of dependence on precision physical moves made rapidly in response to screen and possibly audio feedback… now suppose I’m impaired in those departments and need accommodation, maybe slow the clock or a special mouse or game controller to deal with my shaky hands, can I still play??? Am I cheating?
Re: Re: Re:
Not even competitive gaming. Look at how VRChat threw its vast disabled communities under the bus by breaking all the tools they relied on to be able to interact with each other in this virtual space.
Not only that, but the anticheat implementation they added to it did not and cannot stop the most common forms of exploitation in VRChat which is designing custom avatars that crash other users’ clients.
Re: Re: Re:2
And with VRChat, it’s not exactly by choice.
Officially and according to VRChat themselves, EAC is meant as a stopgap to free up manpower to actually move forward on developing the software itself, which PRESUMABLY also involves fixing the BIG SECURITY ISSUES.
Their manpower is limited, and, until the EAC bullshit, was doing tech support on mods. A lot of the issues were about mod compatability, which was further made worse by the software not having a proper modding API, and their UI modding stuff is… arcane at best.
To clarify, I am no supporter of them using EAC and the problems they cause. And a lot of it is self-inflicted if we’re talking VRChat. I can only hope EAC buys them enough time to actually scale up their dev processes and get the manpower they need to work on these issues.
Re: Re: Re:3
… so VRChat has a “by invitation only” mode, where you only interact with people you (or your friends) have invited? … which would not include people crashing your system or otherwise require invoking EAC?
No?
Re: Re: Re:4
Yes, it has that mode, and everyone who uses VRChat basically says to use that mode exclusively after you manage to become a regular user, which is 24-48 hours or so of using public worlds.
And for that, they recommend to use a throwaway avatar.
Apparently, old-school IRC was in a similar state…
Re: Re: Re:
“In the competitive AAA videogame genre”
I’d love there to be some consistency with terms. AAA doesn’t mean eSports. Assassins Creed is as much a AAA series as CoD.
Re: Re: Re:2 Word-finding question...
So, PaulT or anyone, how would you describe the class of widely-advertised, widely recognized game requiring quick, accurate muscle reflexes to sights on the screen and sounds from the speakers? Is there a good single word for it??
AAA video games seems close, though (showing my age and non-gamer-ness) Pac-man might not fit within AAA class anymore.
Re: Re: Re:3
“how would you describe the class of widely-advertised, widely recognized game requiring quick, accurate muscle reflexes to sights on the screen and sounds from the speakers?”
Twitch gaming maybe. Some AAA games fit that definition, but certainly not all of them. The term has more to do with budgets and development scope, not the gameplay.
Re: Re: Re:3
If we’re talking AAA games, that’s just the budget definition.
Most mainstream AAA titles tend to be first-person shooters, usually military-themed (or sports-themed in EA’s case) and involve a multiplayer mode of sorts, usually online.
And honestly? Your definition is so vague it covers just about every game out there. And might actually cover non-video games as well…
Re: Re: Re:4 counterexamples
Counterexamples, as in the games that don’t require good reflexes:
The Sims
Wordle
Online Chess (to a degree)
Re: Re: Re:3
The AAA classification of games was borrowed from the credit industry classification of bond ratings to give an indication how big a budget a game has/had, it has zero to do what type of game it is.
Makes me wonder if the “house” is using cheating as an excuse to make more money…
Presumably the games work on at least some PCs, since even the most clueless company isn’t going to want to have to refund every customer on the platform.
And what’s the alternative? As an example, the telephone has been ruined by cheaters, such that the majority of calls come from spammers and no one answers rings any more. Techdirt has had articles asking for technical measures to be taken to block spam calls. Why is it different for games?
Sometimes software is released in bad shape (like Cyberpunk 2077). That doesn’t make it beyond redemption. It just needs to be fixed and rereleased. Or maybe it’s such an impossible task that it can’t work at all? I guess we’ll see. But the attempt to block cheating is not intrinsically wrong.
Re: DRM/Anti Cheat Software
It’s going to get really tough to algorithmically detect cheating…although the recent discussion of how chess.com detects cheating in chess was really interesting; they looked at move timing and quality over a period of years.
All computer inputs can be fooled. And since a good hypervisor implementation makes it impossible to tell if you are running on a virtual machine, cheating is going to be an arms race, just like DRM, outside of closed platforms, and closed platforms have a tendency not to stay that way.
In the end, I don’t think cheating matters in single player mode, and for tournaments, the tournaments will have to take some control on the rigs used to play..like either setting up the machines themselves. Randomizing the player to machine assignments would be difficult because there’s an incentive to make my opponent’s machine behave maliciously.
Re: Re:
Who needs a hypervisor anymore? Machine learning’s pretty much at the point where one will be able to point a camera at the monitor and have an external system emulate a real keyboard and mouse to play the game. That’s what the next generation of cheating will look like; don’t be surprised if people try to force DRM into keyboards and mice, such that your old ones won’t work with new games.
Re:
“Presumably the games work on at least some PCs”
Yes, for now. Future updates might break something that’s been working. Then, the paying customer is being accused of something they didn’t do and has to either jump through hoops to prove they weren’t breaking the law or T&Cs, or they have a game they can’t play through no fault of their own.
“Techdirt has had articles asking for technical measures to be taken to block spam calls. Why is it different for games?”
Because a product you buy and a utility you rent are such totally different concepts that the answer should be obvious after a few moments thought. The short answer is that it should be expected that the phone service is able to pre-screen obvious spam before it sends the calls in your direction, whereas blocking access to a product you “own” on your own computer is very problematic and involves blocking access you have actually requested yourself.
“Sometimes software is released in bad shape (like Cyberpunk 2077). That doesn’t make it beyond redemption. It just needs to be fixed and rereleased.”
…and there’s a great many valid criticisms of that, but also people should expect refunds, etc. for being supplied with a broken game.
“But the attempt to block cheating is not intrinsically wrong.”
Nobody’s saying that it is, and the article explains quite simply why this particular method is wrong.
Re:
Well, the person complaining can’t even successfully launch the game. I see little reason for anti-cheat software to be involved before they even try to get online. Even then, an obvious alternative would be to let players decide whether they want to enforce anti-cheating requirements on their opponents. If they don’t want to run such software, let them play against other people who don’t want to run it.
Always has been.
“Now, console gamers may chalk this all up to the perils of PC gaming.”
This and DRM are certainly the reason why it’s been a long, long time since I’ve bought a PC game. Of course, the publishers used such decisions from people like me to claim that piracy was the reason for lost sales and to double down. But, at the end of the day, I game console-only now because I wish to keep work/home data away from malware, and PC publishers seem intend on loading machines with malware that blocks access to legally purchased products if you don’t pirate. So, I’m no longer in that market.
Anti-cheat software, including the one mentioned here, is starting to require Secure Boot and TPM (at least on Windows 11, which infamously supposedly requires both).
This just proves that these anti-cheat devs don’t understand their threat model; Secure Boot and the way that a TPM is currently used by Windows (for disk encryption and measured boot) are not supposed to protect against a computer’s owner (here defined as a person with physical access who knows the password of an admin user); they can be bypassed easily by them, whilst still being enabled.
This doesn’t even involve the several security vulnerabilities that have existed in Windows bootloaders.
Re:
I could very well be wrong but I think the TPM/Secure Boot requirements are being used more to identify PCs that are consistently used for cheating so that they can be banned from connecting to online MP (though this does create its own issues with regard to said PCs being resold to unsuspecting people who lack knowledge of this stuff).
Re: Re:
“I could very well be wrong but I think the TPM/Secure Boot requirements are being used more to identify PCs that are consistently used for cheating”
That sounds very problematic.
“this does create its own issues with regard to said PCs being resold to unsuspecting people who lack knowledge of this stuff”
Also this. If wiping a PC and using a different account to connect is not enough to avoid being accused of “cheating”, there’s all sorts of problems ahead. Yes, actual cheaters can abuse this, but if the current account used to connect isn’t used for cheating, you’re asking for false positives. Hopefully consumer rights will kick in at some point and people who haven’t done such a thing will get a refuse guaranteed or access to the property they paid for.
Re: Re: Re:
Consoles since at least the Xbox 360 also have the same thing where they can be banned from connecting to online services if they’re associated with repeated terms of service violations or have been detected as being tampered with.
Avoiding this software messing up my PC’s performance is why I own a console. One of the first checks I do prior to buying a game is find out if it has anything like this, and if so it goes firmly in the “console-only” list. It’s ridiculous that I need to do this to protect my system.
Re:
And yet, you still buy the game, and you provide no specific feedback to the publishers. That is, you provide no incentive for the publishers to do better.
Re: Re:
For now at least, one of the advantages of buying on console is I can pick up a second hand copy of the game for £5 and the publisher doesn’t see a penny.
The other side of it is that, especially with the rise of F2P games, simply banning cheaters has become less effective so the focus has turned to stopping the cheats themselves from working (though bans are still used). As cheats also abuse kernel mode themselves, anti-cheat has been forced to move into kernel mode to fight back (Riot has said this when they announced Vanguard – their own kernel mode driver).
As for the issue of false positives (Destiny 2 and Apex Legends), that has always been a risk and it’s not unique to anti-cheat systems (anti-malware software has these issues too).
The phone requirement for COD is more to get rid of the toxic players that deal in harassment, racism, homophobia, etc (though there is a lot of crossover with cheaters). COD multiplayer has been notorious for that sort of behaviour since the original Modern Warfare 2 (and maybe even as far back as COD4) and Activision has been trying to clean up that series’s reputation ever since. Is it the right way? Probably not (as evidenced by the requirement being walked back for Overwatch 2). Are there any other ways outside of requiring verified identities (and all the issues that come with that)? Also probably not.
Re:
The same Vanguard that caused system instability AND was cracked in 3 weeks?
Re: Re:
It was always going to be beaten at some point because it’s impossible to make any software 100% unhackable. Anti-cheat has always been (and always will be) a constant battle.
The system instability Vanguard caused can be impossible to reproduce in an internal QA environment because of the infinitely variable nature of PC configurations (both hardware and software). That’s where constructive input from end users (including submitting logs, system information, etc) becomes a valuable ally in finding and fixing these issues. The same applies to the issues seen with FIFA 23 (and reviewers probably have more contacts within publishers to get these issues raised with the support teams and investigated).
Re: as a thought
The company cannot control what runs on my machine. nor should they. They can, however, scrutinize the inputs to the server. If they are trusting user machines to give valid inputs… well, I have so many reasons that’s a bad idea that it’s funny.
Re: Re:
That’s actually the point of the kernel mode drivers in anti-cheat systems to begin with. You can’t do that at the server level because of the latency it would add to games (especially FPS games – even more so in an esports setting).
Well there be any consequences?
So some people can’t play the game, aim, and the journalist can’t review the game, but will there be any consequences for the company? As long as people continue to buy the game, the company will have no reason not to add these kinds of anti-cheating tools.
It’s only when enough people stop buying the game that the company will notice there’s an issue. But even then, the company will probably just blame piracy for the low sales.
Re:
It’s just like DRM. Gamers will bitch but mostly continue to hand over their money. It’ll go away when the anti-cheat companies start demanding too much money for their products.
Re: Re: End of Anti-Cheat
Quoting the AC:
It’ll go away when the anti-cheat companies start demanding too much money for their products.
Nah, that’s not what killed DRM — what killed DRM is when the DRM started being cracked the same week or day the games came out, leaving pirates unaffected.
Anti-cheat will need something similarly big. ADA legal exposure might do the trick. Maybe chess.com style analysis of action streams from server-mediated multiplayer games might do it. Maybe game cracking might do it.
Re: Re: Re:
“Nah, that’s not what killed DRM — what killed DRM is when the DRM started being cracked the same week or day the games came out, leaving pirates unaffected”
That’s part of it, but the very presence of the DRM removed a lot of people from the market. Should I continue on the constant upgrade path to play the latest games, only to have malware constantly trying to determine if I should access the legally purchased software on the same machine I use for my banking and employment? Or, buy a dedicated machine that I don’t have to modify and don’t carry the risk?
With that, the tendency to have a half-finished game with 100GB patches and long queues on release day, it’s no wonder people often don’t pay a premium to buy a new release. The “anti-cheat” stuff is another icing on the cake – sure, it’s nice not to have bots on the server, but if you’re not going to be able to load the game to begin with…
The sad thing is, these things are probably not the realm of the people who make the actual games. They’re usually demanded at the last minute by publishers, who think that if they have DRM and anti-cheat stuff there they can excuse low sales. Not realising that these are things that lower sales to begin with.
Re: Re: Re:
I’m kind of looking at this as “price per day of effectiveness”; even if the price stayed the same, it became “too much money”. I’m not sure PaulT is correct that it had anything to do with people disliking DRM. Maybe people with problems were tying up tech-support lines—a different form of “too much money”. But is there evidence that principled objections to DRM were significant to the game companies’ decisions?
Re: Re: Re:2 Evidence...b
You are correct in that we need more evidence on how the actual decisions got made. Best I can do is pretty well known:
Some rather high-profile failures of denuvo,
the general idea that the successful and in power tend to be there by luck and not by particular skill in what they do — see Elon Musk
and by watching old organisations tending to fall apart — they seem to turn inward, rather than responding to their environment — see Sears Roebuck or Woolworth’s
Re: Re: Re:
What finally killed off DRM was the Sony Rootkit issue.
Having Malware that actively fucks with your computer actually made people (read: the masses) realize that DRM was not worth it.
Re: Re: Re:2
Not really given there were quite a number of high profile DRM-related controversies in games for a number of years after the whole Sony Rootkit mess (not to mention the whole “Online Pass” controversy).
Re: Re: Re:3
That Sony rootkit was in 2005. DRM on PC games back then was mostly in the form of anti-CD-copying techniques like SafeDisc, whereas online activations etc. got popular afterward. And whether or not “the masses” knew DRM was harmful and useless, they kept installing it.
Hell, even a few of the commenters on this Techdirt story seem fine with supporting DRM as long as it doesn’t personally inconvenience them (e.g., on consoles, which have been DRMed more and more since the 1980s).
Re:
As I understand it, many cheats use preloaded data on the users machine as the basis of the cheats.If for example a game is relying on z-ordering to hide something, looking at the model database on the user machine to locate invisible targets, give the edge when opponents are about to appear. Such cheats cannot be prevented at the server level, except by moving all rendering into the server farm, not something a games company wants to do for high resolution high frame rate games presentation.
Between intrusive DRM, online activation, always online requirements, and the requirement to install digital distribution platforms like Steam or Origin, I don’t even want to play any of today’s games.
Don’t get me wrong, some of them look amazing and I’d otherwise want to play them, I just don’t want to deal with the bullshit and not being able to actually own what I’ve paid for.
Looking back
There was a time… long ago. People purchased media and placed it inside their system. We played. We had fun
If you want to play with others you connect another controller.
Those days are gone. Today single players are stepped on for the “good” of the “online experience”.
Anti-cheat is a disaster.
Not only does it disrupt the play as mentioned in this posting; it also has destroyed the mod and exploration ability of offline users.
Re:
“People purchased media and placed it inside their system. We played. We had fun
If you want to play with others you connect another controller.”
There was also a time where you couldn’t play if you had nobody to be with physically, and where bugs in games blocked you forever.
I’m all for criticism here, but if you’re going to say that the past was perfect, I’m going to have to confiscate those rose coloured glasses.
Re: Re:
Didn’t say the past was perfect. Just that modern online gaming is causing problems for EVERYONE. Online and off.
Anticheat is a toxic cancer in gaming.
Said it before
and I’ll say it again:
If you want to run effective anti-cheat for multiplayer, that doesn’t piss off the customer?
run it on the server.
Why?
Because, frankly, games have no business in the modern era running at any greater privilege then a non-admin user. (I dare say, it’s getting to the point where I think a specifically sandboxed account isn’t a bad idea…)
EZ anti cheat
My software for controlling the RGB on my keyboard and mouse gets picked up by EZ anti cheat. Very annoying to have to use task manager and close the process every time I start games that use it. Especially if those games are buggy and crash semi frequently (I’m looking at you Vermintide).
Yeah, you’re so close to being apropos. But not close enough. Try again.