You know, Valve once considered making an entire OS to prevent cheating. I’d assume something like SteamOS, but incredibly locked down and designed for playing Valve games. Obviously that never got past the idea stage, but disregarding the truckload of issues with that idea, one big one is that you could use either physical cheating tools, by messing with the direct hardware inputs, or run it in a VM. Basically, unless you have a player in a locked-off room, with a pc, keyboard, and mouse provided by you, and the pc running your own locked-down OS… well, someone’s gonna figure out a way to cheat.

That’s not to say that anticheat can be ignored entirely, but since there is no remotely reasonable state which could eradicate cheating entirely, you need to find a happy medium of not “infecting” the player’s pc with a new backdoor, because even if you’re not malicious, someone else will be, and nothing at all. Something that has a minimum level of invasiveness with a maximum level of cheating prevention, at least filtering out basic script kiddies.

The problem with that is, nobody cares. Basically nobody even knows what a “Kernel” is and what “Kernel-level” means and implies, so it’s just some weird anticheat for them. Also, as long as DRM doesn’t interfere with their playing experience, they don’t care either. Barely anyone will even notice if a few frames are missing, because Denuvo is chilling in the background, keeping the game “safe”.

We are a subset of privacy-minded people in a subset of somewhat knowledgeable gamers. Losing us as customers doesn’t matter in the slightest to the devs/publishers, and nobody else will make a fuss, or at least they’ll not stop spending money.