How Are Game Cheats Made?
Cheating in video games compromises fair competition and creates a bad experience for gamers. The game cheat industry is big business, and cheats are an ongoing challenge for developers and players alike. This article investigates five of the most common game cheats, their impacts and the ongoing fight against them.
How are game cheats made?
The development of game cheats is a highly specialized field of hacking. Creating a game cheat involves taking advantage of vulnerabilities within a video game’s code and software to gain an unfair advantage over other players. This can include everything from a simple aimbot to complex scripts that manipulate the behavior of other players in real time. Unlike your average hacks, game cheats are very tightly integrated into the gameplay and require special software and hardware to create.
This integration makes them a difficult target for anti-cheat tools, and it is not uncommon for game cheats to continue working even after an update to the anti-cheat tool has been released. This is due to the fact that hacker developers are constantly working on finding ways around the latest anti-cheat protections in video games.
The first step in the process of making a game cheat is to figure out how to gain access to the video games memory. This typically involves a process called “memory dumping” or “hex dumping.” Once the hacker has determined which file within a video game is vulnerable they will start to work on their cheat code. Once the code is finished they will then inject it into the vulnerable file, or in Windows case a DLL (Dynamic Link Library).
As gaming began to expand and become more graphical game cheats became more popular. They were shared amongst gamers through magazines and websites dedicated to listing third-party cheat codes for various systems. This eventually led to the gaming guide craze of the 1990s and the creation of the famous Nintendo Power magazine.
Often game cheats are not intentional by the video game developer. They are inserted into a video game either through third-party software such as a debugger or trainer or hardware such as a cheat cartridge. They can also be realized by exploiting bugs that have been discovered after the game has been produced.
Cheating in video games can be very damaging to a company’s reputation and brand image. It can also lead to a loss of user loyalty and reduced revenue for the video game publisher. According to Irdeto’s Global Gaming Survey, 33% of gamers admit that other gamers’ cheating negatively impacts their multiplayer gaming experience. This can include a player using a cheat to artificially boost their win rate or ranking, coin farming, stat-padding and even scripting. If left unchecked, cheaters can destroy a video game’s competitive online experience and damage a game’s overall quality. In order to prevent this, games must make a concerted effort to secure their multiplayer servers and protect their user’s experiences.