Author: Shachar Keidar

A group of cheaters operating at a commercial scale for profit flooded this AAA mobile game’s marketplace, completely disrupting organic transactions. Traditional detection methods failed to stop their activity.

Using Quago’s solution, the studio enjoyed these benefits:

• 600,000 cheaters detected and removed over 6 months
• Marketplace integrity restored – real players could trade safely again
• Significant reduction in player complaints
• Fast and independent policy enforcement by the game team
• Improved long-term player engagement
• Prevention of recurring disruption

Download the full case study to learn more

 

Wouldn’t it be nice to recover an extra $100 million a year? That’s what some of the biggest studios are losing to large-scale commercial cheating networks. These aren’t just casual cheaters, they’re well-organized operations exploiting games for massive profits. These operations run like actual companies. They have developers building tools, dedicated workflows, and teams managing activity across multiple games. This is their full-time job. It’s a structured and repeatable business designed to extract as much value as possible from in-game systems. 

Solving problems at this scale requires senior leadership. It takes someone who can see the full picture and lead the response, as it impacts multiple departments within the organization, including support, player experience, monetization, and operations.

And it’s not just a AAA problem. These networks target games of all sizes, wherever there’s an opportunity to profit. It’s a growing problem that’s reshaping the landscape for game developers.

The Astonishing Costs

Cheating operations directly impact game revenue by undercutting in-app purchases. On grey market platforms, an in-game building tool that officially costs around $7.50 can be found for just $2.90, less than half the price. It’s a small purchase on its own, but at scale, these transactions add up to significant losses. These underpriced sales devalue the in-game economy and discourage legitimate spending from real players.

A major gaming studio also reported spending over $6 million each month on support after being overwhelmed by cheating-related tickets. In this case, real players experienced poor service as the studio’s support team struggled to keep up. 

These losses impact multiple departments and require a senior executive who can coordinate efforts across them. Technical fixes alone aren’t enough to fully solve the problem.

Read more about the impact of cheating here. 

Behind the Curtain of Sophisticated Cheating Networks

Understanding how commercial cheating networks operate can help studios take informed steps to mitigate risks. Let’s explore what makes these organizations so effective:

Game Trading Marketplaces: A Parallel Economy

Commercial cheating networks thrive on platforms like G2G, Eldorado, Player Auctions, and many more. These grey markets offer both legitimate services and avenues for cheaters to monetize their exploits. From pre-nurtured accounts to in-game currencies, nearly anything can be bought, often with detailed instructions and low prices.

For example, a quick search on G2G or Eldorado shows thousands of listings for in-game currencies across dozens of games, with some sellers offering automated delivery, step-by-step setup instructions, and volume discounts for repeat buyers. Platforms like Player Auctions and Zeusx even use escrow services, holding payments until buyers confirm delivery. 

But that doesn’t guarantee a safe transaction. Some users report sellers reclaiming accounts or failing to deliver goods, and marketplace reviews can be unreliable or fake, creating a false sense of trust.

Examples of in-game item offerings on a grey market site.

Investigative Insights

To understand their methods, Quago explored a popular casual mobile game developed by a AAA studio. Here’s what was discovered:

• The Scale of These Operations Is Staggering: One seller alone manages over 4,000 accounts, 9,000 items, and 1,000 currencies across 400+ games. This sophistication demonstrates the organized nature of these operations.
• Account Purchases: Buying pre-nurtured accounts was a seamless process, with credentials and authentication codes provided promptly. These accounts are typically nurtured over months or years to seem authentic and valuable. In one case, Quago analyzed tagged purchase data linked to an account that had been nurtured for two years. After payment, the seller provided all the account details, including username, password, and two-factor authentication code. Some sellers even shared tips on how to avoid detection, such as waiting before changing account credentials, to reduce the chances of being flagged or banned.
• Item Transactions: Cheaters used in-game friend requests to transfer high-value items at token prices, bypassing the game’s standard acquisition mechanics. The buyer pays the cheater on an external platform and then completes the token-price transaction within the game. These transfers mimic legitimate player behavior, making them hard to detect. To facilitate these transactions, Quago had to “befriend” the cheaters in the game. However, once the purchase was complete, these “friendships” were immediately dissolved, highlighting the purely transactional nature of these interactions.
• Currency Purchases: Buying in-game currency was more complex. Since direct transfers were not possible, the seller arranged a fake trade. Using tagged data of purchases, Quago observed a case where items were sold for a nominal price and then bought back at a much higher price, transferring the agreed-upon currency.
• Organized In-Game Operations: These operations consist of thousands or sometimes tens of thousands of accounts working together inside the game. They are created daily. Some are left inactive for a while, and others are played normally to appear legitimate. These accounts are then controlled using scripts to form in-game trading networks that farm resources and transfer assets. In some cases, entire in-game communities are fully automated and used to boost accounts. This can include helping cheating-service customers gain an edge in events or tournaments.

The Challenges of Traditional Anti-Cheat Measures

Traditional anti-cheat measures often fall short against commercial cheating operations. Designed to catch mostly indie cheaters, they struggle with the scale and sophistication of professional cheating operations. Key challenges include:

• Minimal Activity Patterns: Cheater accounts often play sporadically, making detection difficult.
• Advanced Tools: Emulators and replay attacks replicate genuine player behaviors, masking cheating activities.
• Rapid Adaptation: Cheaters swiftly adapt to bans, employing techniques like VPNs or strategic account creation to evade detection.
• Fear of False Positives: Game studios hesitate to act decisively without 100% confidence, fearing false positives that could alienate real engaged players.
• Hidden Beneficiaries: It’s not enough to detect and remove the bot accounts used for farming. These accounts are often easy to replace. What matters more are the beneficiary accounts. These are the ones that receive the resources, items, or boosts generated by the cheating operation. They may be operated manually or automatically. If left untouched, they allow the cheating network to continue profiting and growing.
• Exploiting Low-Friction Systems: Cheaters take advantage of game environments designed for player convenience. These same systems can also make it easier for cheating operations to scale and stay under the radar.

Commercial cheating operations actively use tactics to blend in with normal gameplay, making them hard to catch without an additional layer of visibility. Traditional detection methods rely on game events or surface-level activity, but cheaters often use tactics like replaying actions or coordinating across many seemingly unrelated accounts. Solutions that can analyze how users interact with their devices, not just game events, provide deeper insight into suspicious activity, even when it mimics authentic behavior.

A Holistic Approach to Mitigation

Combatting commercial cheating requires a broad strategy that targets the entire cheating ecosystem. These strategies become far more effective when supported by solutions that provide deeper visibility. Effective mitigation requires senior leadership that can see across all departments and drive a coordinated response.

This includes detecting coordinated cheating activity, mapping account and device connectivity, and analyzing how users interact with the game using sensor-level data that goes beyond what’s captured through game events. This covers:

• Detecting coordinated cheating networks manipulating game mechanics and economies.
• Designing policies for each cheater group that limit their ability to profit while minimizing negative impact on real engaged players.
• Monitoring forums where cheaters exchange tools and techniques.
• Disrupting marketplaces that enable the sale of illicit in-game assets.

Success relies on the ability to confidently distinguish between real engaged players and commercial cheaters. With that confidence, game studios can focus on the interconnected elements of these operations and dismantle entire networks rather than addressing individual accounts.

To read more on mitigation strategies, click here.

Steps Game Companies Can Take Today

Game studios can start mitigating commercial cheating by taking these steps:

• Understand the Ecosystem: Learn how cheating operations are structured, how they monetize, and which parts of your game they target.
• Use Advanced Detection Methods: Focus on identifying coordinated activity across accounts and devices, not just unusual behavior in individual sessions.
• Adapt Continuously: Stay ahead of cheaters by evolving your strategies in response to new tactics, patterns, and the ways operations reorganize after enforcement.

A proactive, tailored approach is critical to staying ahead in this ongoing battle.

Staying Ahead of Cheaters

Commercial cheating operations are relentless, but a proactive, comprehensive strategy can significantly limit their ability to operate. By focusing on the interconnected elements of these networks, game studios can make it much harder for cheaters to exploit their games.

Ready to reclaim control over your games? Talk to us

Cheating in games isn’t just a player experience issue. It is a complex challenge with significant financial consequences that puts many games’ business models at risk.
Watch the full recording of this Community Clubhouse panel at GDC 2025, where industry experts unpack the hidden and visible costs of cheating, share real-world examples, and explore its impact on operations, analytics, and player trust.

Panel Participants:

• Nidhi Gupta – Engineering Leader at Roblox
• Micah Roland – Senior Manager, Product Management – Game Integrity at Scopely
• AC Ward – Director of Anti-Cheat Engineering at Electronic Arts (EA)
• Alon Dayan – CEO at Quago

Moderator:

• Andrew Hogan – Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Intorqa

 

 

 

Link to full video

Cheating in online games isn’t just a nuisance for players—it’s a billion-dollar industry that drains revenue and destabilizes game ecosystems. In 2019, the gaming industry faced an estimated $29 billion in revenue losses due to cheating, and today, as gaming expands, those losses are likely even higher.

In this blog post, we’ll delve deeper into the multifaceted impact of cheating on the gaming industry, focusing particularly on commercial cheating operations—organized groups that exploit games on a large scale for profit. These operations generate billions of dollars, and with such high financial incentives, they won’t stop easily. For game studios, this creates persistent challenges that threaten both their revenue and player experiences.

For a broader understanding of cheating typologies and tools, read our cheating typologies blog.

Cheating Harms In-App Purchase Revenue

In-app purchases (IAP) are the backbone of revenue for many mobile games, generating billions of dollars annually. Cheating directly undermines this critical revenue stream, threatening the financial stability of game studios.

One common cheating service is boosting, in which players share their account credentials with cheaters, who then log in to their accounts and rapidly boost their progress. Using bots, scripts, or other cheating tools, the cheaters amass large quantities of in-game resources and achievements, allowing the player to progress quickly without putting in any time or effort. While this might seem like an easy win for the player, it undermines the integrity of the game and disrupts its economy.

Cheaters also use automation and other tools to flood the in-game economy with valuable items, which they sell outside the game at cheaper prices. Players often turn to these external sources for a faster or more affordable way to acquire items, further bypassing the in-app purchase system.

A variety of in-game items and boosting services available in online marketplaces.

Cheaters Inflate User Acquisition Costs

User Acquisition Fraud refers to any activity that artificially inflates the number of installs, clicks, or views on a mobile game. Within this broad category, a significant and growing challenge is User Acquisition Manipulation, where bots or cheaters mimic real player behavior to distort campaign metrics. This manipulation has significant financial consequences for game studios. With mobile games’ ad spend projected to reach $103 billion in 2024 and $131 billion in 2025, the stakes are higher than ever. Imagine how much game studios stand to lose when a portion of this spend is wasted on fake traffic instead of reaching genuinely engaged players.

Fraudulent players—using bots or automated scripts—interact with in-game ads, download apps, or simulate actions like reaching specific game levels, causing studios to pay for fake traffic. For example, in cost-per-install (CPI) or cost-per-engagement (CPE) campaigns, studios pay for each new user install or engagement, with higher fees tied to deeper actions like reaching a certain level or making an in-app purchase. Fraudsters exploit this by setting up bot networks to mimic real user behavior, misleading studios into believing they are successfully acquiring genuine players.

Reward apps and offerwalls, where players earn real money or in-game rewards for their engagement in games, are particularly vulnerable to User Acquisition Manipulation.With direct financial incentives at play, commercial cheating operations aggressively exploit these systems. By deploying bots and scripts to generate fake engagements, they inflate campaign performance metrics. The incentive to cheat in reward apps is so high that these manipulative activities persist and are challenging to eliminate.

Addressing these challenges is critical to protect game studios’ resources and ensure their investments lead to real, meaningful engagement.

Cheating Skews Player Analytics

When cheaters disrupt game data, the consequences are serious—flawed decisions, wasted resources, and a distorted understanding of player behavior. In some cases, as many as 20% to 40% of players may be cheaters, often part of larger commercial cheating operations, making analytics unreliable.

Online games generate massive amounts of data, and game developers rely on this data for crucial insights—whether it’s deciding which features to add or remove, allocating their media budget, or expanding into new regions. For this data to be valuable, it must be reliable and accurate.

Imagine a studio seeing a spike in signups and traffic from a particular group. The studio might think these positive User Acquisition metrics are due to a successful marketing campaign and decide to double down on it. However, if the new accounts are mostly cheaters, its marketing decisions will be flawed. Similarly, they might be concerned about a sudden drop in retention among new players.

Making decisions about changes to the game also relies on gameplay data to reflect player preferences and engagement. When cheaters’ actions are mixed with legitimate player behavior, it skews the analysis, leaving developers uncertain about what features resonate or how long players spend on key activities. Without accurate insights, studios are unable to fully understand and cater to their real audience.

To avoid flawed decisions, game studios must filter out cheaters from their datasets. Cleaning this data ensures a clearer view of what’s actually happening, helping studios track key performance indicators more accurately and make better-informed decisions.

A GIF showing two graphs of the same app: one with all user traffic and one with authentic user traffic, highlighting how skewed data can lead to misinformed decisions.

 

Cheaters Undermines Community Sentiment

 For game studios, the stakes are high: around 1% of players—often referred to as ‘whales’—generate 50%-70% of in-app purchase revenue. These valuable players are crucial for profitability, but they won’t stick around in a game they believe is rigged by cheaters. Even the suspicion of cheating can leave a bad taste, leading to negative reviews, player churn, and a damaged reputation.

Cheating disrupts the trust and enjoyment that are core to the gaming community. Online gaming is more than just a pastime—it’s a deeply social experience. Avid gamers often meet in person or coordinate online sessions to enjoy the game together. This tight-knit community is built on trust, and when cheaters infiltrate, that trust is broken, creating dissatisfaction and frustration.

In most online games, there’s a vibrant in-game economy where players can earn items through gameplay or purchase them via in-app purchases. Cheaters disrupt this delicate balance, skewing supply and demand and leaving legitimate players feeling disillusioned.

When cheaters dominate, they create an unpleasant environment for real players. Legitimate players may face frustrating scenarios with artificially inflated options while playing the game or receive spammy friend requests tied to cheater operations. These issues degrade the players’ experience, harm their connection to the game, and often lead to churn.

Examples of players sharing their frustration about cheating in popular games on Reddit.

Cheating Increases Cloud Costs

Cheating significantly inflates operational expenses for game studios, with cloud infrastructure—one of their largest costs—taking the biggest hit. Inauthentic activities, such as bot networks and automated scripts, increase usage dramatically, forcing studios to spend millions more on cloud resources each year.

Cheaters, especially malicious bots, automation, and scripts, tend to be far more resource-intensive than legitimate players. While a human player might log in for a few hours a day, a bot can run 24/7 for weeks on end. Even if cheaters account for a small percentage of players (say 4%), they can still account for a massive amount of gameplay time (say 40%); eliminating them could save tens of millions of dollars annually.

 

However, it’s not as simple as just taking action against cheaters. They often find alternative methods to access the game and persist with their activities, meaning game studios must continuously monitor suspicious behavior and mitigate cheating.

Cheating Increases Support Costs

Cheaters significantly strain a game studio’s support system, driving up operational costs. One of our customers, for example, was spending several million USD per month on support tickets, with a significant portion tied to fraud.

Legitimate players often submit support tickets after encountering suspicious activity, which requires thorough investigation by the game studio. However, commercial cheating operations present an even bigger challenge. These operations flood support systems with fraudulent requests in attempts to take over player accounts.

Using stolen personal information, cheaters might claim to have lost access to an account and trick the support team into handing it over. For instance, a cheater with a player’s email address could request account access by claiming to have forgotten “their” password. Some even resort to brute-force methods to hack into accounts.

While chatbots can handle simpler tickets for as little as $0.15 per ticket, resolving fraud-related cases often requires human agents, costing around $4 per ticket. With hundreds of thousands of tickets opened daily, these costs can quickly escalate, creating significant financial strain for game studios.

Cheating Inflates Direct Marketing Costs

Cheating doesn’t just affect gameplay; it also wastes marketing budgets, draining resources that could otherwise drive player engagement. When a significant portion of a company’s database consists of cheaters, the money spent on marketing campaigns is essentially being thrown away.

Consider a gaming studio that wants to reach out to its player base via email or text to announce a new feature, highlight a competition, or share other marketing content. To ensure these messages don’t end up in spam folders, the studio must use compliant email or text message providers, which typically charge based on the number of recipients.

Each dollar spent on sending marketing messages to cheaters is a lost opportunity to engage real players who contribute to the game’s success. Cheating directly undermines marketing efforts, adding yet another layer to the financial strain it places on game studios.

Cheating in Online Games Is Not a Victimless Crime

Cheating in online games impacts everyone involved. Game studios suffer from lost revenue, wasted resources, and the inability to make informed decisions. Engaged players feel betrayed, and in some cases, they may even churn.

To combat this, game studios need to gain visibility into cheater accounts, take back control over cheater networks, and make strategic, creative decisions to restore balance and protect the integrity of their games.

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How is cheating impacting your game? Contact Quago to find out. 

Cheating in online games disrupts fair play, undermines player trust and engagement, and drains game studio revenues. Mitigating cheating is crucial to overcoming these challenges. This post focuses on effective strategies to mitigate cheating. It emphasizes the importance of understanding cheaters’ motivations (the why) and methods (the how) in order to do it effectively. By taking the correct action against each type of cheater, game studios can implement better defenses and create a more enjoyable and profitable gaming experience.

Know Who You Are Up Against

A crucial first step to stem the tide of cheaters is understanding the type of cheaters you’re dealing with. For example, commercial cheating operations are typically well-organized, work in groups, and are motivated by profit. In contrast, individual cheaters might be solo players who love the game but exploit cheats for personal gain or to enhance their enjoyment. 

To effectively counteract these cheaters, you need to start monitoring their activities for at least several weeks. This observation period helps you gather information on their activities, the number of cheaters or devices involved, and their motivations. Without this understanding, your actions will likely be ineffective, like a game of whack-a-mole where you hit them in one spot, only for them to pop up in another.

Even after you take action, continuous monitoring is essential. Cheaters often reappear and adapt their methods to evade detection. Keeping a close watch ensures you can promptly address new cheating tactics as they arise, maintaining the integrity and enjoyment of your game.

Mitigating Commercial Cheating Operations

Understanding the motivations of commercial cheating operations is crucial for effective mitigation. These entities operate as businesses, generating millions of dollars through cheating. For a deeper dive into their typologies, see our cheating typologies guide.

For commercial cheaters, simple warnings or outright bans are just speed bumps. With numerous backup accounts and tools at their disposal, they can quickly return to the game and resume their activities. It’s important not to alert them to your mitigation methods, since they will figure them out eventually. No matter what you do, it is a constant cat-and-mouse game with these operations, similar to how a virus evolves and adapts to survive.

Reduce Commercial Cheaters’ ROI

To hit commercial cheaters where it hurts—their return on investment (ROI)—you need to understand and disrupt their business model, making it unprofitable for them to continue. For instance, if a cheating operation sells cheating tools, you can give the users who use the tool (typically legitimate players) a warning. This demonstrates to players (the commercial cheaters’ customers) that the game studio is aware of the cheat. As a result, they may complain about the cheat provider or choose not to purchase from them in the future. These actions reduce customer demand, ultimately making it not worthwhile for the cheating tool operator.

Going Beyond the Ban

An outright ban of commercial cheaters can be largely ineffective. They typically return within days, often using backup accounts, new devices, or other evasive tactics to bypass restrictions. Banning based on geography? They’ll simply use a VPN to appear from a different location. Ban based on session length? They’ll alter their session durations. Any action that is clear to the cheaters that they were detected will not work for commercial cheaters since they still have the monetary incentive to continue.

Improve Ban Effectiveness Through Misdirection 

A ban can delay, but rarely stop, the impact of commercial cheating operations. If bans occur too quickly, cheaters may refine their scripts and “A/B test” to evade detection, sharpening their tactics over time. Instead, bans should be carefully timed and sometimes combined with tactics that mislead cheaters about the real detection method. For example, if they have been detected through sensor data, the ban could appear to be based on their IP or device type. This prompts cheaters to alter superficial details, thinking they’ve evaded detection, while in reality, ongoing monitoring reveals their evolving strategies.

Disrupt Cheater Account Sales

Commercial cheating operations often “pamper” accounts to prepare them for sale, providing certain advantages from day one (e.g., more lives, better tools, or powers). One way to mitigate this is by targeting this entire pool of accounts, even those that are not actively being used. If the cheater is growing multiple accounts to sell, it’s far more effective to identify and ban their entire operation network by analyzing patterns of similar behaviors across associated accounts. Banning these accounts soon after they’re sold and have changed hands can also damage the cheater’s reputation within the marketplace, as buyers who experience bans are likely to demand refunds.

Targeting Cheaters Selling In-Game Items

For cases where cheaters farm in-game items and sell them outside the game, the process is more complex. These cheater accounts generate new items, but banning them doesn’t affect the inventory they’ve already accumulated and sold. Here, identifying existing accounts by tracing suspicious activity patterns associated with known farming techniques can help. This approach locates old cheater accounts and addresses both new and old supplies.

Boosting Services for Indie Cheaters Requires Nuanced Detection

Lastly, some cheaters offer “boosting” services, temporarily taking control of legitimate player accounts and using bots or scripts to boost in-game resources. These accounts can blend into the legitimate player base, requiring more nuanced detection to distinguish them from other legitimate players. In such cases, cheating operations are less predictable and require multiple detection methods to remain effective. These tactics can include analyzing play patterns, connections between players, devices, and other elements, as well as identifying suspicious activity.

Clean Up and Focus on New Accounts

Although outright banning is not a long-term solution, it can be useful for a temporary clean slate. Once the slate is clean, you can focus on new account detection, which reduces the number of users to monitor. Strengthening account validation for new users can involve combining registration requirements with real-time sensor data. Standard requirements like CAPTCHA or device verification can be complemented with sensor data to identify and track new accounts with suspicious patterns, reducing large-scale account creation by cheaters and creating a more manageable group to monitor.

Limit Cheaters with “Bugs” and Lags

A more subtle way to sabotage commercial cheaters is to introduce “bugs” into the game, making it difficult for cheaters to realize they have been targeted. For example, making a button unclickable or intermittently functional can frustrate automated cheating operations. Preventing players from performing specific actions, like trading above a certain amount or halting trading altogether, can also be effective. It will take time and an advanced monitoring system for the cheaters to identify what is happening, and in the meantime, their profitability will be impacted. 

Another method to disrupt commercial cheating networks is to insert lags into their gameplay. While legitimate players would complain if they experienced such lags, automated commercial cheating operations might not notice it immediately, reducing their profit margins by slowing down their bots, hacks, and automations. These small, annoying interferences reduce the cheaters’ ROI and could eventually make them reconsider targeting that specific game.

The Legal Approach

Some game studios have attempted to prosecute commercial cheaters or take legal actions against the marketplaces that facilitate their trade. However, identifying these cheaters is nearly impossible due to their communication channels like Discord and Reddit. In one case, Activision won an aimbot lawsuit, but there is no confirmation that the cheater paid the damages. Even if a game studio could get a commercial cheating network to pay, the damage goes far beyond the monetary; it is almost impossible to regain community trust once overall sentiment has deteriorated. As a result, we are unaware of any legal actions that have effectively mitigated commercial cheating networks. 

These tactics are flexible guidelines that need to be tailored to each game’s structure and player interactions. Each game’s systems, player dynamics, and communication channels differ, so studios must analyze the specific components of cheating operations in their own game before implementing countermeasures.

 

Mitigating Individual (Indie) Cheaters

Indie cheaters are vastly different from their commercial counterparts. Many indie cheaters genuinely love the game and seek to enhance their experience. They require a completely different set of countermeasures.

Classify Indie Cheaters into Groups

Understanding indie cheaters is even more critical than understanding commercial cheaters. You don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm for the game. We recommend taking a holistic approach, tracking everything you can, both outside and inside the game. By outside the game, we refer to player sentiment, into which you can gain insights by following conversations in player forums on Telegram or Discord. Inside the game, you need to monitor the same sensor data that you do for commercial cheating networks.  

To treat different groups of indie cheaters appropriately, classify them according to their behavior and impact on the game. For instance, indie cheaters who create negative community sentiment might be better addressed through bans. Other groups might benefit from warnings or specific restrictions tailored to their actions. This nuanced approach helps maintain the positive aspects of their engagement while minimizing disruptive behavior.

Turning Cheats into Game Features

If an indie cheater has purchased an external tool to gain an unfair advantage, consider whether it’s a feature worth offering within the game itself. This approach not only retains revenue within the game but also enhances the overall gaming experience. For example, you could introduce automation for boring parts of the game, turning a common cheat into a legitimate – possibly revenue-generating – feature. 

By adding new features inspired by popular cheats, you can cater to indie cheaters’ desires, thereby improving player satisfaction and increasing in-game spending.

Temporary Restrictions for Unfair Play

If indie cheaters are disrupting leaderboards or competitions, consider issuing a warning followed by a temporary ban. This could be a partial ban, such as temporarily turning off a particular game feature, preventing them from benefiting from their cheating behavior. Coupling this with a warning lets the cheater know they’ve been detected. You can prevent or limit specific indie cheaters from participating in a tournament or block them from appearing on the leaderboard. These measures help maintain fair play while allowing cheaters to correct their behavior without permanently losing their place in the game.

Winning the Battle Against Cheating

Cheating undermines the integrity and enjoyment of online games. To effectively mitigate it, you need to know WHO you’re up against (commercial or indie cheaters), WHAT they are doing to cheat, and WHY they are cheating (for profit, fun, or prestige). Once you understand the cheating landscape, you can use the methods described here to combat it. However, it is not a “one-and-done” process; it’s more of a game-within-a-game, one that the game studios play against the cheaters. One that the game studios need to win. 

 

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Learn more about how Quago can help game studios detect and understand cheating behaviors in online games so they can mitigate them.

Taking a break from the busy Gamesforum Hamburg, Dan Blechner, our Co-founder and CPO, was interviewed about Quago’s mission to empower gaming studios with deeper insights into their players. Speaking with Gamesforum’s Josh Vowles, Dan provided a glimpse into our cutting-edge sensor-data technology that offers an exclusive data layer and unique insights into player behavior.

He also shared strategies for combating various types of fraud: click fraud, in-app CPA fraud, and end-user fraud. He discussed how cheating impacts monetization margins and ways to manage cheating to ensure fair play and reliable data analytics for gaming companies. Dan emphasized that Quago’s technology not only detects post-install event abuse and cheating but also prioritizes user privacy, ensuring a secure and fair gaming environment.

Dan addressed key challenges in mobile game growth, including evolving privacy regulations and fraudulent activities that distort data and impact user acquisition. Dan explained how Quago’s advanced churn prediction model forecasts player churn within 24-48 hours, enabling timely interventions to boost retention.

Read the full interview here.