This is most annoying

Riot tells Ars kernel-level system could be removed if vulnerability is detected.

Source: Ring 0 of fire: Does Riot Games’ new anti-cheat measure go too far? | Ars Technica

Given Riot’s labor and cultural practices I’m not holding much hope for them being able to fix issues quickly when (not if) someone breaks their driver and turns it into a rootkit like Sony’s.

Another issue the article does not go into is the fact every major game publisher will develop their own kernel-mode driver or use a 3rd party service (like BattlEye) to do so, leading to issues within the kernel that will be:

A pain in the ass to diagnose

Hidden from the player

Likely will not provide any kind of error message since the developers will be afraid they could be used to break the driver.

The risk of collisions between drivers will be increased, with likely both publishers being the cause.

Microsoft can help but there’s only so much they can do before breaking compatibility with previous versions of Windows; Gamers don’t care as much but Microsoft does have to worry about their main customer base (enterprise) who will definitely not like having weird code fuck around with workstation kernels(like this, and what Swift is complaining about is mere user-level applications.

People with time and money will probably want to look at PCI Passthrough to be able to run games in a Windows VM and not have to worry about any of this fuckery. Something goes wrong? Just restore to a previous snapshot of the VM and carry on as usual.