Electronic Arts (EA) is beefing up FIFA 23 anti-cheat measures for PC players, the publisher announced in a lengthy new blog post. The new anti-cheat system operates at the kernel level, a program that works in a computer’s operating system. EA will install it automatically when users download the game. It only runs when the game is running, and uninstalling it also removes the anti-cheat system.
EA hopes to reduce the number of cheats that give players an unfair advantage in competitive play, either through cheats that alter gameplay or exploits that give them more FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) Coins they can use to acquire more FUT cards and recruit more players.
EA said in the blog post that FIFA 23’s anti-cheat will gather no data from the player’s computer.
“EA anti-cheat will only look at what it needs to for anti-cheat purposes in our games and we have limited the information EA anti-cheat collects,” senior director of game security Elise Murphy said. “EA anti-cheat does not gather any information about your browsing history, applications that are not connected to EA games, or anything that is not directly related to anti-cheat protection.”
Some fans weren’t convinced, though.
“It appears EA has decided to include spyware in their new FIFA 23 title that could potentially have access to everything on your computer,” one Twitter user wrote. “Even if EA remains honest, it creates a great attack vector for others to exploit. Great job EA!”
Other fans expressed concerns over how the anti-cheat system may affect mods. Murphy said cheaters often use single-player modes to reverse engineer games and create cheats they can then use in multiplayer modes. The software will work in single-player and offline mode to combat the issue, and some expressed concern over how that may affect mods for Career mode.
“The entire mode is held together at the seams with what appears to be duct tape,” one fan said on Discord. “The painful experience of the Career mode is why many content creators went to PC. It was to fix the game that you have not fixed.”
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF.
