I agree. Games are a ~$200 billion industry with about 3.6–3.7 billion players. Competitive PvP is a huge slice of that, and cheating is one of the things actually killing it.
This is not harmless. Studios have to sink millions into anti-cheat before a game even ships, then keep spending for the entire life of the title. There is no finish line. Cheat developers start the moment a beta is public. Every patch is another round. That cost comes out of the same budget that is supposed to build the game, and it keeps eating revenue after launch. Players who work all day still queue into matches that might just end up a disappointment because of 1 person. Games worth millions have died from this.
People stream aimbots and wallhacks in public while selling them for CS, R6, Rust, Fortnite, Warzone, and everything else. Anti-cheat alone is not solving it because the other side is a business.
I don’t just want pressure on the people writing and selling this. I want consequences for the people using it. People that advertise and market it.
If you buy from a dealer, "I didn’t manufacture it" does not clear you. You bought the product. Same here. The user is the demand. A ban they can buy around is a fee, not a deterrent.
Knowing use of this software should be treated as defrauding a commercial service. Fine them. Make it follow the person. Keep going and escalate. Until the people paying for this eat a real cost, studios will keep burning millions on a fight they cannot win.
The legal system has barely treated this as a market worth protecting. That ignores the people who get a couple of hours at night and the developers who wanted that money and time to go into the game.
Cheating is one of the biggest things killing PvP gaming.
It’s gotten to the point where a game doesn’t even need to fully release. The moment there’s a beta or any form of public access, cheat developers are already working on it because there’s serious money to be made.
Just scroll through TikTok and you’ll find people blatantly streaming themselves cheating while advertising and selling cheats for CS, R6, Rust, Fortnite, Warzone and basically every competitive game you can think of.
It’s a huge reason I stopped playing PvP games myself. When you constantly have to question whether you were genuinely outplayed or whether the other person was cheating, the entire point of competitive gaming starts to disappear.
And from what I’ve seen, it’s getting worse, not better.
Anti-cheat alone clearly isn’t solving the problem. Studios need to put far more pressure on the businesses and developers profiting from creating and distributing cheats in the first place. Until there are serious consequences for the people making money from this industry, I don’t see the problem improving.