Here's a message from Arrowhead's Technical Director:

Hi everyone,

My name is Peter Lindgren and I'm the Technical Director of HELLDIVERS 2. I've been making games at Arrowhead since the Magicka-days and I've been involved in every game we've released to date.

I will do my best in this post to address the concerns and confusion that's come up recently regarding the choice of Anti-Cheat software in HELLDIVERS 2.

So, let's start off with the more urgent questions:

Is GameGuard a kernel-level / administrator-priviledge anti-cheat?
Yes, GameGuard is a "kernel-level", aka rootkit, anti-cheat. Most anti-cheat run at "kernel-level", especially all of the popular ones. It's unfortunately one of the more effective ways to combat cheating.

There are some anti-cheat that can run in "user-mode", but they are much less effective and tend to be cracked very quickly, resulting in widespread cheating.

Will GameGuard stay installed on my system after I've uninstalled HELLDIVERS 2?
No, GameGuard is removed at the same time as the game is uninstalled.
The installer and uninstaller for GameGuard is visibly included with the game in <install-dir>/tools/GGSetup.exe and <install-dir>/tools/gguninst.exe.

I'm worried about my privacy, will GameGuard collect sensitive information about me?
No, GameGuard does not collect any personally identifiable information (PII). And doing so would be a GDPR/ADPPA nightmare as well. I can speak from experience that we're all bending over backwards to be compliant with these regulations.
On a more technical note, GameGuard is scanning the running processes (applications) for malicious software and attempts to block such software from manipulating the game client.

Will GameGuard reduce the performance of my PC?
GameGuard is only active while the game is running and after thousands of hours of testing we’ve not noticed any noteworthy degradations of performance on our developer and QA workstations.

And the big one that needs plenty of context:

HELLDIVERS 2 is a co-op/PvE game, why do we even need Anti-Cheat?
That's a great question, and there's two related but separate points to it:
First, we want everyone to have a great time playing HELLDIVERS 2, with friends, ex-friends or randoms. What we've seen in some of our and others' games is that rampant cheating tends to have a very negative effect on players openness to playing, especially with randoms.

There's an anecdote from HELLDIVERS 1 I'd like to share:
When we released HELLDIVERS 1 on PC there was effectively no anti-cheat implemented. Additionally HELLDIVERS 1 uses a peer-to-peer networking model, and that means, from a security perspective, each game client will blindly trust each other.
Shortly after release we noticed there was a cheat going around which granted 9999 research samples. Unfortunately any non-cheaters in the same mission would also be granted 9999 research samples. These non-cheating players now had their entire progression ruined through no fault of their own.
We were able to deal with a lot of these early issues without using a third party solution, but it took a lot of work, and most of it was done reactively.

Incidentally HELLDIVERS 2 also uses a peer-to-peer networking model, but this time around we're trying to be more proactive and make sure everyone can play the intended experience.
Second is the Galactic War. There's this huge metagame going in the cloud which all players (and game clients) participate in. Even though we have other countermeasures in place, a cracked game client could make it easier to disrupt the Galactic War, which would sour everyone’s experience.

As a final note, on an open platform like PC it's not possible to stop cheating from ever happening. Someone with the skills, dedication and resources will ultimately succeed. The point of anti-cheat is to make it more difficult and time consuming to develop cheats.
Needless to say we will be keeping a very close eye for any issues that may be encountered at release.

See you on the battlefield 😉

-Peter


Frequently Asked Questions about anti-cheat:
We collected responses from Reddit, Discord, and elsewhere and have compiled our answers here.

Q. Isn't using anti-cheat just to protect the game's monetization structure?
A. Yes, and no. While it will protect monetized content, our primary purpose in using it is to protect the social aspect of the Galactic War gameplay and preserve player experience.

Q. Does using nProtect GameGuard impact PC performance?
A. We have not seen a measurable impact on performance in our tests with GameGuard.

Q. Why did you choose nProtect GameGuard over other anti-cheats available?
A. We investigated feature sets in many of them, and GameGuard met our needs in preventing cheating in the Galactic War.

Q. Is nProtect GameGuard a security risk? i.e. Will it override security functions, create a backdoor into my firewall, allow malicious software such as keyloggers, etc.?
A. No. GameGuard communicates with a few servers for patching and reporting. However, it doesn't modify anyones firewall settings and it doesn't install other software. INCA, the creators of GameGuard, sells GameGuard as an anti-cheat solution. Their incentive is to make a good anti-cheat for publishers, developers and gamers. Installing malicious software is very illegal activity.

Q. Will GameGuard interfere with programs like MSI Afterburner, or monitoring software like hwinfo64?
A. We don't know all the things GameGuard might react to, but we are actively whitelisting known good programs. If you encounter any issues with GameGuard killing a process that should be whitelisted, please reach out to our support team.

Q. If I uninstall GameGuard, is it totally uninstalled or are files left behind?
A. The administrator level anti-cheat service that is installed with the game is removed when the game is uninstalled (or gguninst.exe is run). However, we've noted that there are some remnant files left in the game directory in the Steam library folder. They can be simply deleted though as they're only previously downloaded GameGuard updates.