Valve has announced that developers who want to put their games on Steam will need to disclose whether those games are using any kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software going forward.
Announcing the changes via the Steamworks community page, Valve says this is a change that's been requested by both developers and players; devs want better options to "share anti-cheat information" with players, while players are requesting more anti-cheat "transparency".
To that end, a new field has been added in which developers can indicate the anti-cheat software that comes with their game. If a developer's game contains kernel-level and client-side anti-cheat measures, then those measures must be disclosed via this new field.
This also applies to games that are already on Steam, so developers who are currently using kernel-level anti-cheat solutions will need to add this disclosure to their games' Steam pages.
If games are using anti-cheat that isn't kernel-based or is server-side, then their developers aren't technically required to disclose this information, but Valve says it thinks that letting players know about this would be beneficial on both sides.
If you're a Steam developer, you can find this new option in your Steamworks landing page, under the "Edit Store Page" heading. A new "Anti-Cheat" option will be available, and Valve says it's made a list of the most common software providers so you can easily fill out the field.
It's worth noting that even if a Steam page already discloses its measures somewhere else in its text, then that information should now be migrated to the new field and removed from the existing area.
Plenty of games use kernel-level anti-cheat measures, with big guns like Halo Infinite, Sea of Thieves, and more incorporating it into their online components.
However, some games have been the subject of controversy due to their anti-cheat measures.
Back in 2022, for instance, a vulnerability was discovered in Genshin Impact's anti-cheat protocols potentially allowed hackers to bypass users' virus protection, and the game didn't even need to be installed for players to be susceptible.
In July that same year, VR social platform VRChat implemented Easy Anti-Cheat, one of the most popular anti-cheat solutions, thereby also banning the use of mods for the platform, a decision that wasn't exactly received well by the VRChat community.