Does Helldivers 2 Have Anti-Cheat DRM?

As with any online multiplayer title, players are wondering whether Helldivers 2 has anti-cheat DRM. Besides preventing cheating and pirating, these types of software can impact game performance and in such cases significantly impact your enjoyment of the game. So does Helldivers 2 have anti-cheat DRM?

Helldivers 2 DRM: What Anti-cheat Measures Does the Game Have?

It’s confirmed that Helldivers 2 does indeed have a third-party DRM. If you visit the Steam page, you’ll see the “Incorporates third-party DRM: nProtect GameGuard” tag listed above-supported languages. This means that GameGuard will launch alongside the game. On one hand, this is a positive feature that prevents other players from joining your session and messing up your save with cheats and exploits.

On the other, the anti-cheat DRM in Helldivers 2 seems to be significantly impacting performance causing FPS drops and crashes for some users. The game uses a Kernel-level anti-cheat and judging by numerous Steam and Reddit complaints, it seems to be negatively affecting the experience performance-wise. That said, Sony has released several updates since launch that have taken care of crashing issues and they even fixed matchmaking bugs.

I should point out that GameGuard, being a Kernel-level rootkit anti-cheat doesn’t collect any personally identifiable information from your PC. Furthermore, uninstalling the game also removes the GameGuard client. All it does is scan in the background while you play Helldivers 2 for malicious software, blocking it if necessary. With the recent performance fixes, the anti-cheat’s impact on performance should be lessening. Keeping out cheaters who could impact the Galactic War is to everyone’s benefit.

That concludes my article on does Helldivers 2 have anti-cheat DRM. For more Helldivers 2 guides, check out how to fix crashing as well as how to claim pre-order and Twitch Drops armor sets.