Anti-cheat, Secure Boot, and what the studio refused to discuss

This is the most misquoted thing about the game right now, and the misquote runs in a specific direction: a conditional statement is circulating as a blanket requirement.

The Secure Boot sentence

The studio reserves the right to require Secure Boot from a player whose account is linked to cheaters.

Stated in in Steam announcement — The 11th Reason NOT To Buy WARDOGS, 8 September 2026

That is a targeted escalation, applied to accounts that have already drawn attention. It is not the same claim as “Secure Boot is required to play”, which is the version spreading through forum threads and being copied onto reference pages. If Secure Boot later becomes a universal requirement, that will be a new announcement, not a re-reading of this one.

What the studio deliberately did not say

It named no anti-cheat product, and said so on purpose — the framing was that discussing anti-cheat publicly is counterproductive. Two third-party accounts naming different products are in circulation and they contradict each other, so this site does not pick one. What is checkable: the store page carries no anti-cheat disclosure fields at all, which is a real gap given that a kernel-level driver is normally disclosed there, and some players have raised exactly that.

What it told players to do instead

• Use the in-game report function on official servers.
• Play on community-hosted servers, where an administrator can remove someone immediately. Three hosting partners were approved before launch.

The Season 1 pass strengthened the reporting side rather than the detection side: a report tracking system was added, reports are now weighted so repeat and bad-faith reporters count for less, and cheater bans are announced in-server when match termination is off. Listed in in Steam announcement — Pre-Load Live & Season 1 Changelog, 9 September 2026

If the game will not start

A protection layer that refuses an executable produces a launch failure, not a crash mid match, and that is the most-reported shape of problem right now. Two adjacent pages are relevant: Linux and Proton, where the studio told buyers to refund, and system requirementsif the game does start but runs badly — those are different problems with different fixes.