Game Cheats and Game Hacks

Game cheats or game hacks are pieces of code written to modify a games internal side to offer players special abilities. In general they take advantage of a weakness in a games program and then rely on hooks to allow the cheat to extend its functionality. Creating a game hack or cheat is a multi step process that requires the programmer or hacker to understand how to use programming languages, memory management, how graphical interfaces work, 3D rendering and even the internal structure of the gaming engine.

Cheating in video games has a long history. The first self-made cheats were used in the 1980s, when adventurous gamers with a little computer knowledge would use their 8-bit computers to manipulate the system’s memory and change values like lives, health or ammo. They could then use the information gathered to boost their character in-game or create new strategies that would give them an edge over other players. This new breed of third-party cheats was popular enough to inspire magazines, websites and eventually a TV show, all dedicated to listing cheat codes for consoles and computers.

Aside from the thrill of going against convention, some gamers find that using cheats in a game allows them to experiment with new strategies that they wouldn’t be able to try without an edge over their opponents. In fact, many gamers say that they feel a sense of eliteness by being the only ones to know a certain in-game secret. Some cheats are so advanced that they can alter the balance of a game or its fiction, and developers are often willing to let players use them – as long as they don’t interfere with other gamers.

In the 2000s, the rise of the global professional gaming industry – also known as esports – has caused a change in the way that developers view cheating. With huge sums of prize money on the line, developers are incentivized to develop controllable environments that can’t be exploited by external hardware and software. In addition to obfuscating and virtualizing code, they also employ anti-hooking and debugging techniques to prevent static analysis of preloaded content, special events or late-game secrets.

As a result, cheaters are less likely to be detected and banned from games. In fact, a recent study found that 76% of gamers say they will abandon a game if it’s not secure against cheating. This loss of user loyalty is costly for a developer, as it’s impossible to grow the audience for a title that doesn’t get any new players to engage with it.

With a large and active community of gamers ready to download cheats, the development and distribution of these pieces of code continues to be a major issue for game publishers. Unless they can crack down on the problem, cheating will continue to deprive honest players of a quality gaming experience and leave them looking elsewhere for their entertainment fix. To combat this problem, game publishers can hire expert cyber intelligence and enforcement to rapidly identify and disrupt sites that promote cheating tools and techniques.