As anyone in the games industry will tell you, cheating is a significant problem - particularly across PvP games and economy-driven business models. At Intorqa, we work every day with Game Security Analysts protecting some of the biggest games in the world.
But the democratization of information, and shortcuts now available to developers across threat communities, means cheating is increasingly impacting smaller games, as the barrier to entry is reduced.
This is borne out by the number of cheats now available for smaller games, which on some key vendors can account for over 80% of the cheats offered.
With ever more popular forums, social media options and chat threads dedicated to sharing harmful practices, tools and techniques - as well as actual code - there are more and more skilled people who can get into what was previously a tough-to-break-into domain - Cheat Developer.
On top of more people getting involved, those who do, can level up their skillset faster than ever before with training academies dedicated to fast-tracking cheat developers’ abilities. And with the cost to entry reduced, more cheat devs are turning to smaller games, as the return on their investment doesn’t need to be so significant as to only be viable within the largest of franchises.
With a game’s economy, gameplay balance and community crucial to its success, developers understandably spend huge amounts of time, money and energy creating and promoting these. But as cheating can quickly impact these, it’s just as important to take measures to prevent threat actors from undermining those efforts.
This means Security Analysts are no longer a "nice to have" - they're an essential part of any gaming company, delivering real value by:
Tracking actors with different pseudonyms across different platforms to help build up legal cases.
Finding new cheats among a sea of noise and fraud to understand and evaluate threats.
Mapping cheat developers to resellers to take the most decisive and impactful action.
Acquiring cheats, often using personas, to help understand how they work and can be countered.
Monitoring for leaks ahead of game releases to maintain control of the narrative.
Researching and implementing new processes and approaches to improve game security.
But with demand for security analysts growing across all industries, including gaming, the supply of qualified candidates is not keeping pace, which means that salaries for these positions are likely to continue rising, and excellence is harder to find.
So, what to do? The key for small and medium-sized developers is to start utilizing the right tools as soon as possible.
Tools that enable security analysts to:
Monitor the status of cheats and assess the effectiveness of your counter-actions.
Track ban waves to understand the impact on cheaters and players.
Monitor the growth of cheats to prioritise targets and understand the users flocking to them
Submit more takedown requests for those communities that are most disruptive
Report upwards with clear and digestible data and insight.
And, above all, to drive more efficient and effective monitoring and responses.
Intorqa’s SaaS platform supports all of this - with just a few clicks we provide more research and insight than the biggest team spending an afternoon on traditional tools can. And, with the largest available database of exploits and threats to the gaming industry, we also provide objective measurement to help gauge the impact of interventions and improve performance.
A cost-effective solution with minimal setup costs, the Intorqa platform is easy to use and can quickly boost the security of your game without spending a lot of money. In addition, with our expert consultants, you can leave time-heavy jobs like persona management to us, and scale up your team as and when needed.
As gaming continues to grow, the Security Analyst’s role becomes ever more critical. Intorqa is here to ensure they can do the best job possible.
Find out more at www.intorqa.gg