he’s determined to keep cheaters at bay. The company has developed a kernel-level anti-cheat system for PCs that it will implement together with fifa23 . According to the publisher, the move was necessary to “ensure fair play” by taking on PC cheat developers who are increasingly building kernel-level exploits that OS-level anti-cheat tools fail to detect.
EA Senior Director of Anti-Cheat and Game Security Elise Murphy wrote that the company created EA AntiCheat (EAAC) because “third-party anti-cheat solutions are often opaque to our teams and prevent us from implementing additional privacy controls or customizations that provide greater precision and granularity for EA-specific game modes.” It should also be able to tackle security issues head-on.
EAAC won’t be used in all EA games, though the publisher says it’s necessary for competitive titles with an online focus, such as fifa23. This year’s edition includes cross-play support, and in theory, EAAC should save console gamers from having to deal with PC cheaters. The company can take different anti-cheat approaches in games without leaderboards or a competitive system. As such, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see EA add EAAC to the likes of but it seems unlikely that it will be patched in the 2021 Game of the Year () .
The tool will only be active when a game with EAAC is running on your PC. It will be uninstalled when you remove all EA games that require it (you can uninstall EAAC manually, but games like fifa23 will not be playable). Murphy wrote that “EAAC will have a negligible impact on your game”, so it shouldn’t slow down performance.
As for system privacy and security, Murphy says that EAAC will only examine the files it needs to prevent cheating. EAAC will analyze the information it collects and discard the original data. The tool will not collect data from your browsing history, apps that do not interact with EA games, or anything else that is irrelevant to its purposes, according to the blog post.
EA is not the first publisher to take a kernel-level anti-cheat approach. Riot and Activision use similar tools in , .
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