Hacks! An investigation into aimbot dealers, wallhack users, and the million-dollar business of video game cheating
Zero is a customer service representative for one of the biggest video game cheat providers in the world. To him, at first, I was just another customer. He told me that the site earns approximately $1.25 million a year, which is how it can afford customer service representatives like him to answer questions over TeamSpeak. His estimate is based on the number of paying users online at any given time, the majority of whom, like me, paid for cheats for one game at $10.95 a month. Some pay more for a premium package with cheats for multiple games.
As long as there have been video games, there have been cheaters. For competitive games like Counter-Strike, battling cheaters is an eternal, Sisyphean task. In February, Reddit raised concerns about lines of code in Valve-Anti Cheat (VAC), used for Counter-Strike and dozens of other games on Steam, that looked into users’ DNS cache. In a statement, Gabe Newell admitted that Valve doesn't like talking about VAC because “it creates more opportunities for cheaters to attack the system." But since online surveillance has been a damning issue lately, he made an exception.
Newell explained that there are paid cheat providers that confirm players paid for their product by requiring them to check in with a digital rights management (DRM) server, similar to the way Steam itself has to check in with a server at least once every two weeks. For a limited time, VAC was looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in users’ DNS cache.
I knew that cheats existed, but I was shocked that enough people paid for them to warrant DRM. I wanted to find out how the cheating business worked, so I became a cheater myself.
Serious Sam Classics: Revolution blasts onto Steam Early Access
You can't keep a serious man down. You can try: firing out jokes at his ears, hoping he'll crease up in diaphragmatic agony. It won't work, as he's simply too serious. For Serious Sam, it's an understandable affectation—likely cultivated from the mass culling of headless bomb-men. And so, rather than leave him to his own devices, a group of fans have gone about retooling his first two adventures. Serious Sam Classics: Revolution is the result, giving Sam advanced graphics shader support, 64-bit compatibility and full Steamworks integration. The game is now available on Steam Early Access, and is free to all owners of both classic games.
Read and commentHalo: Combat Evolved online multiplayer to use GameRanger after GameSpy shutdown
When we first got the news about GameSpy shutting down, the situation looked pretty bad. Once the online matchmaking client shuts down on May 31, the games that still rely on it will have to either transition to a new solution or go offline. Luckily, many developers are working on alternative solutions, and today we learned even Halo: Combat Evolved will still be playable online thanks to GameRanger.
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