Mobile emulators as a way of cheating
Emulators… a term that has been part of every gamer’s language for several years now. I first heard the word when I was trying to take a nostalgic trip back to the PS1 or GameBoy times, but nowadays an emulator is much more than that!
An emulator is a software that allows a computer system (host) to behave as another computer system (guest), for example, in the case I talked about at the beginning of the text, using a GBA emulator on a laptop, that laptop becomes the host and the window that opens as GameBoy becomes the guest. Basically, emulate refers to the ability of a computer program to imitate another program or device.
Now… could this bring dangers to the videogame industry? Of course! Of course, as far as title piracy is concerned, as I have already mentioned, here we will focus on another topic, the problem of emulators using cheat on mobile games. It seems very specific and strange? Let me explain…
Just imagine… you play a mobile game like Apex Legends Mobile, you have battery problems, you have the usual constraints of playing on a mobile phone, touch keys, low visibility, ringtone overlapping, among others… now imagine you install an emulator on your computer where you can even connect a controller and use that emulator to mirror a mobile phone (yours) on the computer ending with all the constraints I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. This gives the person using the emulator a huge advantage over people playing the game where it should be played, on the mobile phone. On top of this, there is another problem. Emulators can be used to create so-called mods (modified games), a technique used to modify values in a game or even bypass or spoof in-app purchases, and disable advertisements, meaning, again, creating advantages over the mobile player.
In a discussion on the Call of Duty forum on Reddit, we see that opinions differ… from players that see the emulator as a cheat to players that simply have this thought: “cheat is when you violate the rules and terms of service of a game, using emulators is not classified as such, so it’s not a cheat”, a lot could be said about this opinion but the truth is that the use of emulators is not controlled by mobile game studios and why is that? Is it a problem of emulator detection by the game code, or is it that a large part of the player base of the game uses emulators and therefore it would not be beneficial for the video game if these same players were removed?
The truth is that these mobile games were made for Android or iOS code, to be played on Android or iOS with the controls available on a mobile phone, so it seems very unfair to me who chooses to play these games on an emulator to be able to do so with a PC controller or even mouse and keyboard, takes away everything for which the game was developed and undermines the gaming community that loves and train hard to be better on that game in a fair way.
Another point to take into account is the fact that the use of these emulators brings a feature that allows users to edit certain values, and enter commands automatically that would enable the game to be played by the emulator automatically (as if it were a bot), this gives a great advantage for certain games such as those in which you need a large amount of farm and grind. Although this method can be tricky to run on a normal emulator, there are cases where the emulator comes with a built-in script and bot/macro editing tool that makes the cheating process easy even for someone with little knowledge in this area.
A problem that will jeopardize the competitiveness of mobile games, fun, and everything they are made for, being played on mobile phones. In a quick search on the internet, we can easily find mobile emulators and also explanations of how to use them as a way of cheating, emulators could be linked to revolutionary software to, for example, play retro games, and they could be used for the good of gaming but this way, they are used for evil.