Over Half of Surveyed Game Studios Report Loss of Players and Revenue Due to Cheating

Cheating in multiplayer video games has evolved from a disruptive nuisance into a major threat to the games industry's bottom line. According to a recent study conducted by anti-cheat company Anybrain, more than half of surveyed game studios have suffered a direct loss in player retention, revenue, or both due to cheaters disrupting their titles.

The study surveyed 250 game development studios across the United States and the United Kingdom. Anybrain, which develops an artificial intelligence driven anti-cheat solution used by companies such as ARC Raiders developer Embark Studios, found that 51 percent of respondents experienced these negative business impacts. Furthermore, 69 percent of the polled studios consider cheating to be a significant problem specifically within their own games.

The survey highlights a growing disparity between security measures and the methods used by bad actors. Approximately 45 percent of the surveyed studios reported that cheaters are actively defeating their existing anti-cheat elements, rendering current defense systems partially or entirely ineffective. Industry experts point to the rapid evolution of hacking methods, which now include artificial intelligence powered cheats, cheap specialized hardware, and highly organized commercial operations that make downloading and using hacks easier than ever before.

The financial scale of the illicit cheating industry is immense. The Anybrain study revealed that a single cheat developer managed to generate 77 million dollars in revenue in 2021 alone, solely by marketing hacks for a single video game. This commercialization has turned video game hacking into a multi-billion-dollar global enterprise.

During panel discussions at the Gamescom trade show, anti-cheat experts from major industry companies like Electronic Arts and Embark Studios discussed the difficulties of countering these developments. Developers noted that the rapid sophistication of cheat software makes it incredibly difficult to permanently defeat bad actors, creating a constant technological arms race between security teams and commercial cheat distributors.