You won’t be allowed to play Valorant on a Windows 11 PC if TPM is disabled

Valorant was one of the breakout games of 2020, with the free-to-play shooter becoming a hit with many gamers out there. Being a popular, competitive free-to-play game however also means there’s going to be a fair amount of players looking to exploit and cheat their way to victory. Riot Games, the developers behind Valorant, now have a new idea to combat cheaters: ban their computers from the game altogether.

Basically, with Windows 11 launching soon and requiring users to have Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) and Secure Boot enabled in their BIOS, you’ll be forced to have that enabled to launch Valorant too. The idea behind this is that because each PC has its own TPM that’s specific to that motherboard or CPU that’s in your computer, cheaters will be banned from the game via hardware identification. Each TPM chip has an RSA key that provides platform device authentication, kinda like your identification card.

If you were to cheat on Valorant, Riot Games could not only ban your account or IP address, but your physical computer as well thanks to the TPM chip’s RSA key ID. This would likely deter potential cheaters from using exploits in the game, as getting caught and banned could mean having to replace either your CPU, motherboard or sometimes your entire gaming machine too. And if you don’t have TPM 2.0 enabled, Valorant won’t let you launch the game at all.

So far, it seems as though the TPM requirement to play Valorant is limited to just Windows 11 PCs for now. This would make sense as Windows 11 also requires TPM 2.0 to run. However, if Riot Games does want to implement the TPM 2.0 requirement to cover Windows 10 users at well, it could alienate a large chunk of gamers as many Windows 10 users don’t currently have TPM 2.0 chips or may not have it enabled it their BIOS.

Nevertheless, this move by Riot Games is being seen as a good thing to deter potential cheats and hackers from ruining other players’ experience in Valorant. Whether or not other developers adopt this move however remains to be seen, though with the way Microsoft is pushing for TPM 2.0 to be a new industry standard, we wouldn’t be too surprised if this new anti-cheat method becomes the norm.

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