Video-Game Cheaters Level Up the Gray Market

Video-game cheating has ballooned into a nearly $100 million industry, drawing millions of paying gamers, putting developers and governments on high alert, and creating cybersecurity risks far beyond the gaming world.

The Big Picture: While cheat codes have been around for decades, competitive gaming is hotter than ever, so many people are looking for a leg up… and will pay good money for it. Researchers from the University of Birmingham estimate that between 30,000 to 174,000 gamers in North America and Europe pay for cheat codes every month.

Behind The Cheat Codes: Earlier this year, EA’s head of game security, Elise Murphy, announced that the company’s Jevelin anti-cheat system has blocked over 33 million cheating attempts since 2022.

That number will likely skyrocket.

• The cheating community has several outlets for sharing cheats — whether lines of code, game mechanic exploits, or even external hardware — including websites, resellers, Discord servers, and other forums.
• The top 80 cheat websites collectively rake in between $12.8 million and $73.2 million per year, according to the University of Birmingham study.
• Many sites offer one-off cheat-code purchases (often under $100) or monthly subscriptions, complete with ongoing updates to keep the cheats functional. 
• Unfortunately, the demand for cheats has also created a hotbed for cybercriminal scams.

Last Level: For the most part, there’s nothing illegal about the cheat marketplace (though China and South Korea have banned it) — but cheats violate most games’ codes of conduct, leading to player bans and lawsuits. No developer wants a game’s experience ruined for the majority of players by cheaters.

So, developers are spending big to combat rogue code. Ironically, that’s made playing certain games a great way to protect devices from other viruses. For example, researchers found that “your laptop’s probably never as safe as when you are playing Fortnite; anti-cheat protection will actually keep you safe from a whole range of malware that normal antivirus will miss.” Nifty.

Next Up: As cheat developers create code that taps into a computer’s kernel — the core of its operating system — the next big software bug could easily start with someone just trying to get an edge in Call of Duty.