When Riot Games launched Valorant in 2020, its Vanguard anti-cheat driver loaded at boot time and ran continuously, even when the game itself was closed. This drew significant public backlash over privacy concerns and the security risk of running a persistent kernel-mode component.
Riot's justification centered on the idea that cheat developers could otherwise disable protections before launching the game, only re-enabling the game process afterward. The controversy became a widely cited reference point in discussions about how far anti-cheat vendors should be allowed to reach into a user's operating system.