Helldivers 2 developer, Arrowhead, has just announced a substantial change to the game's anti-cheat systems: A move away from GameGuard to Easy Anti-Cheat. The change will take place on October 20, and Arrowhead explained in a recent Steam post that the justification for the switch away from GameGuard comes down to cracking down on cheat mods and implementing additional security tools to "improve game integrity protection."

• Implementing additional security measures to crack down on recent cheat mods that have been circulating.
• Transitioning from GameGuard to Easy Anti-Cheat today, October 20th, with additional security tools in place to enhance its effectiveness and improve game integrity protection.

NVIDIA announced today that some of the world's leading game developers are supporting the upcoming RTX Spark PC platform. Launching this fall, RTX Spark will include support for major AAA titles, featuring the work of publishers and developers like Electronic Arts, Embark, and Ubisoft. This list of major publishers pledging their support for the platform is growing, with KRAFTON, NetEase, Riot Games, SEGA, and Xbox already on board. Newly added titles include EA's EA SPORTS F1 25 and Apex Legends, Ubisoft's Anno 117: Pax Romana, and Embark Studios' ARC Raiders and THE FINALS, with many more to come.

Additionally, NVIDIA has collaborated with EA to ensure the EA Javelin Anticheat system supports the RTX Spark Windows-on-Arm platform, making online gaming possible. As readers may know, modern games with online features often include complex anticheat engines that are usually platform-specific, making them difficult to port without the developer's involvement. Many anticheat engines run exclusively on Windows for x86 CPUs, leaving out Linux-based gamers and Arm-based Windows gamers like those using the upcoming RTX Spark. By porting its Javelin Anticheat system to Windows-on-Arm, EA suggests that other developers may soon follow suit with their own anticheat systems.

EA posted a job listing seeking an engineer to port its Javelin Anticheat, a kernel-level anticheat solution, to the Windows-on-Arm (WoA) platform. This is a significant indicator of where the industry is headed, confirming that the biggest game developers are officially porting their game engines, games, and anticheat solutions to Arm-based PCs running the Windows 11 operating system. Interestingly, this coincides with NVIDIA's introduction of its N1/N1X SoCs with Arm-based CPU cores, which are expected to launch in the first half of this year. These will offer consumers 20 CPU cores, consisting of 10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725 CPU cores based on the Armv9.2 ISA, along with a "Blackwell" GPU optimized for low power settings with 6,144 CUDA cores. Adding to the growing ecosystem of WoA solutions, NVIDIA will be competing with Qualcomm's recent Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Plus SoCs.

If readers recall Valve's efforts to port regular Windows games to Linux, one of the biggest issues was the use of kernel-based anti-cheat solutions that simply couldn't work on the non-standard Windows 11 platform. A similar situation is now occurring even between Windows versions, as EA needs to develop a specialized solution that will work on non-x86 deployments like the standard Windows-on-Arm. It will likely be a few months before the official deployment is released, but the job listing suggests that some internal work is in progress. This means that the senior engineer EA is looking for could arrive to quickly bring these pieces together and make the new platform work without any issues.

Battlefield 6 is officially live—and what a launch it's been! Over the record-breaking Launch and its initial weeks, players around the world dove in for millions of matches and a lot of conversation about our battle against cheaters. In a past Javelin blog, we've talked about measuring cheating through what we call Match Infection Rate (MIR)—our measure of confidence that at least one cheater impacted any particular match. You can interpret this as the chance that you as a player would encounter a cheater in your matches.

We prefer using this to know whether we are being successful or not as opposed to just volumes of enforcement such bans because even though we've been busy blocking, kicking, suspending and banning cheaters, it doesn't mean much if we haven't protected your play experience. This helps make sure we focus not just on catching cheaters after they have already cheated and ruined your match, but that we are effectively keeping them from ever producing an impact to begin with. We're proud to share that ~98% of all matches were fair and free of cheater impacts during the week following launch—meaning our average Match Infection Rate (MIR) was ~2%. That means almost every player who jumped into the Battlefield enjoyed a level playing field.

As part of our ongoing commitment to Positive Play in Battlefield, Secure Boot is a requirement to play Battlefield 6 on PC. This supports the need for enhanced security while playing and utilizing new anti-cheat features in Battlefield. As cheat developers continue to evolve their tactics, we're stepping up our game too.

Requiring Secure Boot provides us with features that we can leverage against cheats that attempt to infiltrate during the Windows boot process. It also lets the Battlefield Positive Play team use its own features and related dependent security features like TPM to combat other forms of cheating, the most relevant of which include:

• Kernel-Level Cheats and Rootkits
• Memory Manipulation and Injection
• Spoofing and Hardware ID Manipulation
• Virtual Machines and Emulation
• Tampering with Anti-Cheat Systems