We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

Server side only anti-cheat is one of the problem domains that I'd really love to work on at some point in my career. This is the type of adversarial arms race that just seems really fun to think long and hard about.

Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. It's 'treadmill work'. No matter how many people and how much money you throw at the problem, it still ends up just coming back. It's a losing battle because there are many, many more players than there are developers.

Are there more sophisticated cheat developers though?

Cheat development these days is incredibly sophisticated. There are swathes of tutorials, old and recent examples to research, advanced inspection tools, etc.

It's so much easier to make cheats today than it was, say, 10 years ago.

It's also easier because more and more games are sharing common infrastructure like game engines, as compared to the past. What works in one Unreal game may save you a lot of time developing a cheat for another Unreal game.

These days, many online games encounter serious cheats within the first couple of days of release - if not the day OF release.