What you’re referring to is deterrence, and it doesn’t apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn’t ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.

Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person?

And the efficacy being so bad…

Source?

full access to the system itself.

What do you mean by system in “full access to the system”? Too vague to even say anything about.

And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.

The potential guys that can write the cheat software and how quickly it can be developed is the part that matters. Much like when it’s easy to use an exploit once it’s already discovered. Someone still has to discover the exploit.

Before you can do that, you need to determine whether someone is cheating. This is the purpose of anti-cheat software.

Agreed. Ultra commercial music has always existed. With AI, the threshold to creating it is simply much lower. There’s nothing magic about music just because it’s created by a human, they are very capable of producing bland and uninteresting music too.

Much like every form of security measure, the intention is not to completely eliminate the possibility of an attack (which is impossible in most cases). Instead, the intention is to increase the amount of effort that’s required to make an attack.

Can the EvE online method be applied to dissimilar games like e.g. fps games?

Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games. No one wants to play a game against cheaters since they typically have an unfair advantage. If you can’t combat cheating then you might as well not make the game since no one will want to play it. Fine by me since I don’t care for such games but I could imagine people who like playing them might prefer to play against as few cheaters as possible. What are the alternatives?