I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality. Is it really worth spending dev hours on catching what I imagine is a tiny population of people, who you already know are prepared to use hardware modifications to circumvent anticheat? Or is it just a good marketing point?
I'm not a heavy gamer so don't have great insight, but it seems like you might be undervaluing the problem.
> I find it really difficult to see the value proposition for anti-cheat companies in spending time developing that functionality.
Let's say 1% of the population cheats. Maybe that's high
(or low, but I could easily see 1% of the real world population having less than stellar morals w.r.t. cheating). So you play an online game with 20 people in it. That means on average one out of every 5 games there is a cheater in it.
That ruins the experience for you (and everyone in it). Not to mention now because there are so many legit cheaters, people start mistaking really talented players of cheating. Accusing them, starting back and forth arguments online which worsens the experience even if they're not cheating. This adds to the frequency of assumed cheating. Then one of those 20 people decides the way they'll fix it is they'll download a cheat a next time someone on the other team cheats then they'll start cheating too. And so they do, but sometimes they do it when someone is actually just good an not cheating and so they worsen the game.
Overall if you're a company, trying to run an online game you need a positive environment where people will want to return to play. Cheaters very quickly ruin the trust in a game, and that leads to real financial impact.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear, I’m specifically talking about detecting PCIe cards that modify RAM, as the parent comment mentioned. I appreciate the need for anti-cheat software, but surely the number of people who will not only cheat, but also do that kind of modification is vanishingly small?
Apparently its cheaper than cost of infrastructure that would allow properly implementing server side checks, like validating if the player supplied entity data is within possible parameter limits aka why the fuck is this dude flying all over the map and server letting him do that?!?!?!
They've already pretty much gotten all that low hanging fruit.
Modern cheats essentially can give a player inhuman reflexes. "See, aim, shoot" all mechanized, or even "see, dodge, aim, shoot". Some of them even use sound to locate other players, so it's "hear, dodge, turn, see, aim, shoot".
The cost of of infrastructure to reliably detect that on the server across thousands of players is a lot more than running some cheap process on the user's machine to look for other strange things going on (why does the user have two mice and only uses one to shoot?).
No, you seem to not understand. Modern games dont do the _most basic_ validation on player submitted input - you can use cheats to fly in Apex Legends, Fortnite, PUBG, Fall Guys. None of those games check something as basic as feasibility of submitted player position/physics. Hell, even something as basic as Among Us doesnt run any server side checks and rudimentary cheats let you see everything, move thru walls, or even impersonate other players.
Valve is already using machine learning to analyze player mouse movements across all games to look for "inhuman" patterns and send those directly to the community-staffed manual review process called overwatch.
Cheaters in online games can ruin the game, and drive the playerbase away. It's a really big issue, and ultimately impacts the game developer's ability to continually sell the game to new players.
Specfiically, at about 7:50 into this, he talks about the propensity of encountering cheaters in CS:GO. The tl;dr is that in a 5v5 multiplayer game the percentage of cheaters required to ruin 9 other players' games at once is not high. It only takes 7% of people to cheater to encounter 1 every 2nd game, and a 2% cheating rate gets you a 20% cheater-encounter rate.
I'd also touch on the point that cheating ruins an online-only game. Like, it is the #1 way a game falls apart.
Take a look at a game like Escape from Tarkov, where a cheater will ruin a good block of time for a lot of people just by existing in one game. It's especially bad in that game because the distinction between 'being caught by someone in a position you didn't check' and 'being killed by a cheater' is so unclear, and the consequences of losing are so high (and thus losing to a cheater is so much worse). It creates an environment where the players have to be absolutely 100% confident cheating doesn't exist, or it will very quickly sour people to the game.
