[Industry news] Cheating Is Hitting Game Revenues Despite Widespread Anti-Cheat Adoption

This is a press release posted alongside our usual editorial content.

Anybrain, the collaborative AI anti-cheat built on 120+ multiplayer online games, has released new research which lays bare the industry’s struggles to combat the sheer scale and diversity of cheating in video games. Based on a survey of 250 multiplayer online developers in the US and UK, The Rise of Cheating as a Service reveals 69% of game developers consider cheating a significant problem in their games, while more than half (51%) have experienced a measurable decline in player retention or revenue because of it.

Cheating in online multiplayer games has become a structured, professional ecosystem, bolstered in recent years by the introduction of generative AI. Cheat subscriptions, boosting services, and in-game economy manipulation have made the cheating market worth around $8.5 billion globally. One cheat developer in 2021 was found to have made an estimated $77 million providing a cheat service for a single game.

The upshot of this epidemic is that even though the vast majority (76%) of developers have implemented some form of anti-cheat, they are consistently on the back foot. 45% say cheaters are finding ways around their anti-cheat, causing regular community complaints about cheating (58%). The software itself can cause issues such as technical hiccups (55%) and false positives where innocent players are banned (31%).

André Pimenta, CEO and Co-Founder of Anybrain, said: “We’re seeing cheating change from something individual players did for an edge into a professionalized economy in its own right. The tools available to cheaters now, from generative AI to dedicated hardware, have raised the bar for what a cheat can do, and that’s forced studios to rethink how they approach protection entirely.

“With this study, we wanted a clear, current read on how the problem of cheating is actually playing out in industry, built on real data from the game development teams fighting it on a daily basis.”

Despite an apparently grim picture, 92% of the developers surveyed remain optimistic that cheating can eventually be eradicated from their games. 88% plan to increase their investment to do so over the next 12 months, with AI-powered anti-cheat the most popular addition to the stack ahead of third-party or in-house kernel-level options.

This report forms part of Anybrain’s ongoing work to track how cheating and anti-cheat evolve together as the industry responds. You can download the full report now from the Anybrain website.