Following the recent release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, it has been discovered that Microsoft is building an anti-cheat engine of their own. TruePlay will run as a protected process to help combat cheating by alerting developers of suspicious actions being run on a client machine.

TruePlay is now part of the Win32 API and is only going to be supported for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. Fortunately for end-users, opting in is not mandatory and you can still launch games even if it is disabled.

Instead, developers will be able to make their own choices about how to handle users that have chosen to opt out of using TruePlay. This could allow for publishers to only require gamers to enable the anti-cheat engine for online play and allow users to retain full control when playing offline.

Cheating can certainly ruin the experience for other players. As a result, developers are generally quick to attempt to ban cheaters. However, the uphill battle is always a struggle since the user base is typically many times larger than the development team. Player Unknown's Battlegrounds developer Bluehole Studios, for example, is currently banning over 13,000 players per day to combat the problem.

It is unclear what type of effect that TruePlay will have in the gaming community since it will take quite some time before it is fully implemented and adopted by developers. Given that it is limited only to UWP apps, custom and third-party anti-cheat engines are likely to remain the best way to mitigate cheating for the foreseeable future.