Monetization around cheaters
It is common knowledge that the world of video games and especially online video games are full of cheaters, but do these cheaters create cheats just for the simple pleasure of being better than other players, as was the custom at the beginning of this practice? Of course not, with an advanced technological world and the internet where forms of online money exchange are becoming more and more accessible to everyone, cheaters now do so with an eye to making money, and considerable amounts of it!
In this article we will look at some examples of how cheaters are destroying games on two fronts: in the experience of the player who has to deal with them but also in another way, indirectly or directly stealing money from the studios that build those same games.
Let’s look at the example of a Vice report that scrutinized the cheats empire for PUBG, “Chicken Drumstick,” which even made $70 million in profit, pure and simple, by selling cheats for this well-known battle royale. Here we have a first look at the amounts that are made by selling cheats for video games. This article is an interview with the mastermind of the whole operation, “Catfish”, where the hacker says that this multi-million dollar empire was born because he and his friends started finding cheaters while playing and being a software developer he thought of creating cheats as a challenge, from there to selling them was an instant. This is one of the most famous cases in the world, Catfish’s team has grown so much that he has not only software developers, but a team dedicated to sales just like a legitimate company, which is formed by the first members to have been caught by the Chinese police together with Tencent, the distributor of the game in that region. Between millions in cryptocurrency, yuans, and luxury cars, everything was seized from these members, but as for “Catfish”, he is still loose, maybe retired because he would certainly be able to do it, maybe developing cheats for another video game since PUBG has been decreasing in the number of players.
PC Gamer gives us another example, a cheats empire that earns so much that it has the ability to hire people to create a customer support section to handle all matters related to sales and application of cheats, all through TeamSpeak. This serves to complement the above information that these empires are not just made up of that image that is pushed upon us that the cheater is someone in the dark of his room hacking into online game servers to find out how to counteract them, these are organizations created for the purpose of creating cheats to get rich and they do everything to achieve this goal.
Just to give one more example, Gamebyte presented the case of “Manfred”, a hacker who made his living by making cheats for 20 years, cheats for MMOs, doing what? Farming items and money in MMO games so he could sell them for real money. This hacker found loopholes that led him to create cheats in more than 20 different games and lost the game publishers' astonishing amounts of money. It is this last example, this monetization around cheats that I will talk about in a moment.
After these examples, it is time to talk about a recent form of monetization in video games, another way in which video game publishers and distributors suffer within this topic of cheat monetization. Let’s take the example of MMOs, games that require a lot of grind time from players to obtain items or in-game money to purchase those items. Now, this in-game money is often obtained by completing certain objectives, selling in-game items, or, there will usually be the option to buy this money by paying with real money, this being a major source of revenue for the producers/distributors of said video games. Now, in recent times we’ve seen the growing number of creation of a type of cheat, the bot, to farm money from the game that is then sold a few values below what the game sells, creating a way for players who don’t use cheats to buy money cheaper, for those who make the bots and farm the money is only profit and the studios lose because they stop selling money to many players who prefer to buy cheaper money from these cheaters.
At Anybrain we have built an anti-cheat solution that allows the identification of bots in real-time, thus minimizing the problems of video game producers with bots. Our solution is prepared to identify these cheaters and communicate to the security team of the game that an account is mostly played by a bot. This is only a part of our solution that is prepared to fight cheaters and make the online gaming world a safer and fairer place also through age and fatigue control systems, thus protecting children from games and content they are not old enough for and protecting players from problems related to mental fatigue. If you want to know more about our product, let’s talk!
Sources:
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ywj3/inside-the-worlds-largest-video-game-cheating-empire
- https://ourculturemag.com/2018/05/08/pubg-hackers-and-modern-monetization-strategies/
- https://www.gamebyte.com/gamer-made-living-off-hacking-video-games-20-years-heres/