[lifeformed]

This thread is full of armchair developers who see a problem and immediately think, "Oh, it's easy, just do this simple thing I just thought of," as is there haven't been billions of dollars and decades of research spent on this problem.

[elashri]

According to the latest study [1] estimating how much money cheat developers make annually it is an upper limit of ~ $75M. I would say that the very liberal estimation of anti cheating efforts will cost maybe $100M annually. That does not include only research efforts but actual cost of tackle them (extra compute, reviewers...etc). This is unrealistic but even through to reach the point of billions (2-3 billions) you would say that Gaming companies were spending on average $100M since the beginning of personal computers era (on research only). This is not something that is hard to believe even with the most liberal interpretation.

So I think it is fair to say the there haven't been billions of dollars of research spent on this problem.

[1] https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/anti-cheat-study-reveals-chea...

[lifeformed]

That's only looking at western audiences. In 2020, Tencent said that the cheating market in China is worth $293M annually [1]. In China there are many individual games making billions in annual revenue. PUBG bans over a hundred thousand cheaters every week. I don't think adding up to billions is too farfetched, if you count globally over the decades, although it'd be close.

There are also the costs of the opportunities that cheating prevents from happening. Development would be much faster and more types of games could be made.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3099893/chinas...

[elashri]

Thanks for bringing that up to me. I did not include the largest gaming market and it seems more plausible now this the OP estimations make sense.

Edit: I missed that you are the same commenter that I replied. sorry about that