[vablings]

It is my opinion that a large chunk of the legwork in anti-cheating is solved by protecting your game with adequate server-side checks and heuristics/data. Valve does a pretty poor job of this but there are plenty of games with a thriving competitive environment that does not require the use of kernel anti-cheat.

[Rohansi]

Do you have any examples? Competitive shooters are one of the worst cases because your server-side checks need to allow tolerances to make up for latency, and cannot be so thorough where they would tank performance. Data analysis can work but there's a wide range of cheating styles to catch and you wont be able to catch them before they ruin the fun for a lot of people.