We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

Some competitive multiplayer games.

Which seem to be exclusively FPS games with ~10+M players ?

I don't even remember the last time when I've heard of a game outside that very narrow (albeit decently popular) category to have complaints about cheaters. Meanwhile for these games, I hear about it like every month, and all this despite this genre being amongst the ones that I play the least !

Cheating is commonplace in lots of games much smaller than that. Company of Heroes 2 (an RTS released in 2013) for example is pretty much ruined by map hackers.

Well, it's just a genre that's immensely popular and easy to cheat in.

If you have access to the game's memory etc, it's pretty easy to create an aimbot or thing that lets you see thru walls et cetera.

How you gonna cheat in a moba? It's a strategy game, you need, like, cutting edge AI to beat the best humans at it. In fact OpenAI specifically worked on an AI to play Dota 2, it was that hard.

One thing to note is that CSGO can be considered a play-to-earn type game; you play the game, get lootboxes, get lucky, sell the item for... idk, hundreds? thousands? So it's an incentive to cheat and buy new copies of the game if found out. A single item can be a month's income easily.

Mind you I don't know if that's the case on privately hosted servers as well, since those could be manipulated to give players the points needed to get the lootboxes.

That system incentives against it. Your inventory becomes locked meaning worthless if you get the proper ban. So for farming stuff, it is much better not to cheat.

Not that there isn't options of making money that do benefit from cheating. Like creating high ranking accounts to sell. Which some people buy for the status of the rank...

Maphack that gives vision of other players and resources is a common cheat in many games, including very popular moba games.

You don't need to improve your individual performance to cheat, anything that improves game-sense works just as well. A common one for moba (and other genres) is a radar style hack, which can show an overlay of the map with the player locations in real time. Knowing where you enemies are at all times is a HUGE advantage in a moba.

No, that figure is way off. Check out a website that sells digital goods or cheats and you will see that even far smaller games have cheats available.

Escape from Tarkov comes to mind. An extremely hard and niche first person shooter with RPG elements. It is a private Russian company so we don't know exact player numbers, but it is estimated to be ~200k by some hits in a google search.

There are people who will provide carry services and guns and gear for plenty of people who will pay for it, as well as other providers selling the cheats that the carriers use for a weekly fee. The people who are providing these services are getting paid in USD when their local currency has a far lower value. It isn't a moral thing, it is a money thing.

You know that you sometimes don't know a bug exists before someone exploits it or uses your software in a way that you did not think of. There are experts who stand to make tons of cash if they can create or use an exploit that people will pay money to advance with.

The only way to prevent this is something that no one wants to hear, but it needs to be a unique citizenship identifier of some sort, since HWIDs and other means of tracking are mostly useless.

Any decently competitive scene is going to develop cheaters in some form or another. MOBAs, Minecraft, Fortnite, at minimum I've heard about cheating some form or another. Any speedrunning community is going to face cheaters in some form or another doesn't matter what community you are talking about.

FPS games are kind of the gold standard when it comes to competitive environments, and thus gather cheaters or people complaining about cheaters substantially more than most other game genres.