I'm a security analyst specializing in incident response forensics, but not a great reverse engineer (although I'm trying to learn) or a software engineer, so I have some insight that might be valuable but I might sound ignorant in other ways when I step outside the bounds of my expertise. So forgive me in advance.

I haven't researched Valorant extensively. I have a Windows desktop at home that I use pretty much for gaming, browsing, and social media. I don't do anything on it that would result in a financial disaster if I were compromised.

There are lots of anti-cheats that do various things at the kernel level. I haven't compared their actual functionality to Valorant's. An initial search makes it seem like Valve's VAC is an exception. However I know back when I used to play counter-strike global elite players used to claim like 40% of their games at that level had at least 1 cheater. That doesn't mean it was the result of them not having kernel access if they don't, but I suppose its a possibility.

Some poorly implemented anti-cheats supposedly used to ban people just for having any reverse engineering tools like debuggers and more obviously RE oriented stuff running on a system whether you were attempting to interact with a game related process or not.

AVs, Endpoint Security Agents, and other security related software generally gets more access and do things that would seem highly suspect if they weren't trusted applications. However, sometimes the access was necessary in order to detect increasingly sophisticated malicious activity.

I think in a way we're seeing the same thing with anti-cheat software. If people want to play a serious competitive game without hackers, that might eventually be the price of entry.

Most security decisions are a compromise between usability and safety. I used to work for the government in places where in the name of security they locked down their computers to the point where brand new high end hardware was too slow and broken to accomplish a meaningful amount of work.

So I'm not sure what specific things the Valorant anti-cheat is doing with its kernel level activities. I would need to know in order to compare it to other anti-cheats. I just know that in general there are frequently good excuses for that level of access in anti-cheat programs.

One thought that has occurred to me (which may be a thought born out of ignorance of software development) is that perhaps rolling your own anti-cheat is kind of like rolling your own crypto algorithm, that its a fool's errand for every game company to try making their own when there's something that still works on the market already. Each anti-cheat is bound to have growing pains (Valve got some backlash for things VAC did with DNS queries a long time ago).

I haven't really studied the state of the anti-cheat industry though, perhaps they are all bad.

Basically there are two major concerns from having kernel access. A lot of people focus on the potential of the company to do something nefarious with that access. I actually think that's the smaller risk. Sure it can happen. Sure that knowing what I know about the Chinese government as an Incident Response analyst makes China's partial ownership slightly concerning. However, the most likely scenario that people should be worried about is a 3rd party finding a vulnerability in Riot's anti-cheat solution.

Neither of these concerns is enough to make me stop playing videogames until there's some kind of outrageous discovery about Riot or a working exploit for their software. However, if your whole job or life is stored on the same computer you use for gaming, each person has to decide what level of risk is OK.