Game Cheats and Anti-Cheat Protection
Game cheats are software hacks or modifications to a game’s code that give users an unfair advantage in a video game. These may include aimbots, twinking, artificial lag and wall hacking. They can also be used to gain extra lives, weapons or ammunition, mute opponents and more. Cheating is not just a problem for gamers; it’s a threat to the gaming industry as a whole, including developers and publishers. When games are seen as cheater’s games, players lose interest in the titles and choose to play other games that offer fair competition and an immersive experience.
Game cheating is not a new phenomenon. As early as the 1980s home computer and console game industry, developers inserted specialized hardware or “cartridges” that enabled users to modify the game code before or during its execution. These were generally sold to debugging teams and testers, but they eventually became available to the public. These devices allowed gamers to spawn zombies, fly through the sky and otherwise alter the gameplay in ways that violated game developer intent.
Modern disc-based cheat hardware, such as Datel’s Action Replay and GameShark, enable users to modify game code on a PC or modified console from a database of cheats. A code could be hidden in a game, given away by a developer, or discovered through datamining. Some developers even reveal these codes themselves, either to encourage players to find them or as part of a marketing campaign. Many of these codes have been shared and spread across the community.
The ubiquity of game cheats has made them a constant challenge for developers. While a minority of gamers admit to using them, it’s not an insignificant problem. Amongst the 76% of gamers that Irdeto surveyed, 46% have stopped playing a game if they encounter cheaters (Irdeto). When a player stops engaging with a game due to frequent cheating, it impacts the revenue potential of the title for its publisher.
Effective anti-cheat protection must address a range of methods and techniques, including community reporting mechanisms, continuous monitoring and updates, integrity verification tools that prevent offline tampering with critical game variables, and game code encryption to shield client-server communication protocols from manipulation. Most importantly, it must begin with the assumption that all clients cannot be trusted. By implementing a secure game code design that uses authoritative servers and restricts client-side access to the most critical variables, it is possible to defend against all kinds of attack vectors, from man-in-the-middle attacks to man-in-the-browser manipulation.