The problem with cheating

Hacking games to make player’s life easier and get higher scores has been popular since the early days of computer games. For many players, cheats enabling unlimited energy, unlocked weapons or extra money bring some extra fun to a game. But today, when games became an important part of online business, cheating become a serious problem causing real losses of money.

Hacking leaderboards using tools like Cheat Engine is easy and there are almost 80000 videos on YouTube explaining how to do this. Posting fake highscores became so popular that game developers complain:

degryne: “I delete fake scores several times a day, it‘s a lot of unpaid work.”#

And there’s no simple solution to avoid it. MochiMedia, one of the top games networks, provides developers with a programming framework to prevent cheating, but with no success. If you would check premium games currently featured on mochigames.com you would find out that all of them have at least top three highscores faked!

Why people cheat?

Fake scores on leaderboards make games not only less enjoyable to play but also less credible, which is extremely important issue when it comes to advergaming – games created by advertisers with purpose to promote their brands by entertaining people. Advergaming, contrary to most of the Flash games available online, are expensive productions, often backed up with huge advertising budgets for generating traffic. Most of them rewards best players with valuable prizes which of course attracts hackers too.

As long as the only motivation of hackers is to have fun or gain fame we can consider their activity harmless. When the motivation is to win an iPad – we should consider cheating a cyber crime.

The problem of cyber crime are also facing developers of some of the most popular online games like Zynga Farmville, Second Life or World of Warcraft. In-game “play” money and virtual goods cost real money and players instead of buying them from the game developers are looking for cheaper, unauthorized sources. For example, players can buy 1 million Zynga poker chips for $1.7 which is just one-third of the official Zynga’s price. It’s enough to say that 94% of Zynga’s income comes from selling virtual goods to imagine the scale of this problem.

What types of online games are at risk?

Obviously, the more money is involved in the game the bigger the risk is. However, from technological perspective online games fall in two categories: those with logic on the front-end (like Pacman) and those with logic on the back-end (like Zynga’s Mafia Wars). There are multiple methods to cheat in both type of games, however front-end games are at much higher risk.

Are you a game developer? Do you consider cheating and hacking #flash based #games uber fun or cyber crime?