Microsoft slipped an anti-cheat feature for games into the Fall Creators Update

It turns out the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update contains an interesting new gaming feature that has largely flown under the radar. Called TruePlay, the feature, which was first spotted by VG247, can be used by developers to catch and combat cheaters in PC games. As noted by The Verge, TruePlay was first described in an Insider build over the summer, but Microsoft provided very little in the way of details at the time.

As described in its MSDN page){.nofollow}, TruePlay can run as a "protected process," monitoring gaming sessions for manipulations commonly used in cheating scenarios. TruePlay can then generate an alert and share data with developers when cheating behavior is detected. From Microsoft:

A game enrolled in TruePlay will run in a protected process, which mitigates a class of common attacks. Additionally, a Windows service will monitor gaming sessions for behaviors and manipulations that are common in cheating scenarios. These data will be collected, and alerts will be generated only when cheating behavior appears to be occurring. To ensure and protect customer privacy while preventing false positives, these data are only shared with developers after processing has determined cheating is likely to have occurred.

Microsoft says that developers can choose to exclude certain parts of a game from monitoring, which indicates this is likely geared more towards preventing cheating in online modes, rather than single-player. The feature can also be toggled off altogether at the system level by the users, but doing so can prevent gamers from playing portions of a game that require TruePlay to be turned on. TruePlay is currently toggled off by default, and it's not entirely clear whether any games are currently using it.

Microsoft has made the API available to developers, and TruePlay is currently limited to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games on the Microsoft Store for now. The feature looks like it could be interesting going forward, but it will require developer adoption to be effective in any way.