[Rohansi]

Requiring TPM can actually benefit multiplayer video games because it introduces a secure way to identify hardware being used by cheaters. Right now everything being used by games is easily spoofed by cheats so cheaters just need to get a new account to continue cheating after being banned.

[watermelon0]

Such restrictions usually mean that you can't play games via Windows VM or on Linux directly.

Additionally, there are cheats using video capture cards, which cannot practically be prevented.

[Rohansi]

Anti-cheat software is usually blocking playing in VMs or on Linux anyway.

Some monitors [1] have cheats like that built in now, too. They are much more limited than what cheats do today because they only have access to information visible on your screen (can't see other players through walls).

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/monitors/msis-ai-powered-gaming...

[bjoli]

Wait what? I don't game, so this is new to me. Do you have more info? That seems pretty cool.

[botanical76]

There are cheats that give you more information than you should have. These typically require access to the game process's memory space.

If you're cheating with a video capture card, this likely means you're allowing a program to rewrite your inputs to more accurately target player models. You will likely be banned if you do this on the same machine via screen capture. A video capture card can process the information on a separate computer, e.g. location of enemies by searching for specific colours, then write into a virtual USB mouse on the gaming rig to keep the player's crosshair on the enemy model. I'm not sure about specifics, but this kind of cheat is almost undetectable; it is only really mitigated by the cost and effort involved to do it.

Players can add additional mitigations on top of this, like only activating aim assist while the shoot button is pressed, to make it entirely undetectable.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Video capture cards can be countered with encrypted video from GPU to monitor. That's why you can't screencap 4k Disney+ movies.

[alex7734]

Encrypted monitors can be countered by a high quality video camera mounted on a tripod behind your chair or on a wall or ceiling

Expensive, yes, but at that point you're already spending real money on a second computer with a GPU to do computer vision on the game video stream, so...

[watermelon0]

HDFury devices allow stripping of HDCP 2.2, and vast majority of users currently don't have HDCP 2.3 compatible monitors/TVs, so that's not an option yet.

[botanical76]

I don't know if you need something as expensive as an HDFury. I know most $30 "4K upscalers" have a HDCP stripper built in.

edit: to further your point, though, I think most people's gaming monitors don't support HDCP _at all_. [citation needed]

[jasomill]

While I have no idea how (or even if) it's being used, League of Legends requires TPM 2.0 to be present and enabled on Windows 11 PCs:

https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/artic...

[__MatrixMan__]

Anti-cheat is a lousy cover for something that's going to be much more lucrative when used to correlate the accounts of journalists and whistleblowers such that they can be silenced. It's censorship tech.

[devops99]

This here is a stronger motivator than any other motivator mentioned in all other comments posted. And "journalist" will include anyone who has the "wrong" memes on their machine.

[blibble]

then you just sit on the unencrypted pci bus and sniff the interesting stuff out of it

(e.g. display lists)

already some hacks doing this

[Rohansi]

Anti-cheats are already detecting DMA devices like this.

[blibble]

this doesn't require DMA, just pcie sniffing/proxing

I don't see how you can detect it if it's done properly

[BlueTemplar]

This only matters for a tiny minority of video games, and even a small minority of multiplayer video games : for instance this is not going to be something I'm worried about if I play couch co-op / split screen multiplayer with friends only.