I don’t mean to sound harsh, but it’s tough to tackle this kind of misconception because it’s stated with such certainty that others, who also might not know any better, just take it as fact.
Here’s the thing: Multiplayer servers trust clients mainly for performance reasons. In AAA game development, anti-cheat isn’t something we focus on right from the start. It typically becomes a priority post-alpha (and by alpha, I’m talking about an internal milestone that usually spans about a year—not the "alpha" most people think of which is usually closer to an internal "beta", and "public beta" is more like release candidate 1). During that time, the tech team is constantly working on ways to secure the game. (make it work, make it correct*, make it fast).
If we were to bake in anti-cheat measures from the very beginning of a project, it would force us to scale back our ambitions. Some might argue that’s a good thing, but the truth is, we’d also risk missing critical milestones like First-Playable or Vertical Slice. You simply can’t tackle everything at once—focus is a measure primarily of what you are not doing, after all.
Back when I was working on The Division, we had some deep discussions about using player analytics and even early forms of machine learning to detect "too good" players in real-time. This was in 2014, well before the AI boom. The industry's interest in new anti-cheat methods has only grown since then, I promise you this.
At the end of the day, games are all about delivering an experience. That’s the priority, and a solid anti-cheat system is key to ensuring it. Endpoint security is currently the best solution we have because it doesn’t bog down the client with delays or force awkward mechanics like rollbacks or lock-step processing. Plus, it lines up with the (very heavy) optimisations we already do for consoles.
Nobody in this industry wants to install a rootkit on your PC if we can avoid it. It’s just the best trade-off (for all parties, especially gamers) given the circumstances. And let's be clear—these solutions are far from cheap. We pay a lot to implement them, even if some marketing material might suggest otherwise.
