Cheat, win, repeat: My 2 weeks inside the $73M video game cheat market

One more on the map, and just like that, game time

Baby, let's go! Video games are an escape for the majority of Americans these days

But like many things in life, one person can ruin the experience for the rest of us

Let's get something else in games for ya. Great! Cheating in online games has become so widespread

it actually supports a gray market worth tens of millions of dollars each year

Now, in an attempt to better understand how it all works, we decided to break bad ourselves

spending two weeks as a video game cheater, taking part in the micro economy of cheats

and we'll see if it really made a difference. We'll also dive into how big the cheating problem is for developers and publishers

what makes people want to cheat in the first place, and what happens if or when someone gets caught

I've always enjoyed video games specifically for the competition. I'm Nick Lissetta, better known as Basically Homeless on YouTube

It's like your ability to use coordination in a way that's better than the other person

It's kind of a, you know, there's a competitive aspect to that that's just enjoyable to me

Nick Zetta amassed more than 2 million subscribers by producing videos building crazy gaming setups like a horse-powered PC and outlandish video game cheats

My mom actually would only let me play 30 minutes a day as a kid. But I think that led to like an unhealthy desire to just want to play more video games

My channel started because my friends talked me into making gaming videos

Because, you know, we all played video games together. We were pretty good. It was pretty funny. And so I just started clipping it up

The qualities that make video games so popular are the very same reasons some gamers turn to cheating

Video games in general have three core competencies that people really enjoy

One, autonomy. Right? You have an independence to make a decision. Two, competency

I can be good at something and I will have metrics to show that I'm good at something

And three, community. I can meet people and be with people and not go through what I have to in the real world to be in that community

Dr. Seud says playing single player games can meet one or two of those core competencies

But a competitive online game can hit all three. And game developers have spent a lot of time and money keeping players engaged

You play Call of Duty, you get a kill. Right immediately, it's like plus 100 EXP, right

Boom. It's like yellow highlighted, like boom, it shows up. The on-screen fireworks don't end after the game either

In fact, in a game like Call of Duty, we were inundated with alerts and progression for minutes after games ended

In the weeks leading up to Halloween, there were several events going on, doling out rewards for more time played

And all of that triggers a main dopamine producer in the brain. That fires up that kind of, we call this the ventral tegmental area

and the nucleus accumbens, there this whole circuit pathway Every time that occurs it makes a person feel more competent at what they doing right Think about that in the real world

What would that mean every time, you know, you did something well at the cashier register, if you're a cashier

and then it's like, boom, indication, you have just, you know, increased $3 to your checking account

You would see people jumping immediately. league. And all of that is amped up when players cheat because they're getting more of those good

notifications while also dealing with the adrenaline of being naughty. But players on

the up and up can end up feeling dejected. I would say right now like 30 to 40 percent of people in

most competitive video games are using some sort of cheat. So there really isn't this solid

way to have competition anymore. Cheats have always been a part of gaming. You know cheat codes were

shared in magazines and then newsletters and things um various products are sold which helps

you cheat on consoles for example i'm andrew hogan i am the co-founder and chief revenue officer of

in talker we help publishers um by providing them with intelligence that we gather that will help

them deal with um those people trying to attack their games by selling and sharing cheats and

similar sort of exploits. Now for the early video game connoisseur, codes were their first entrance

into the world of cheats. One of the most famous, the Konami or Contra code, entering the sequence

up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start on the title screen of the 1980s classic

Contra would give you 30 lives instead of the standard three. These types of codes weren't meant

to be cheats. They were tools for developers to use. If a developer is testing a game

they don't want to have to restart after dying three times. Cheating became an issue with the rise of online gaming

and in particular, online multiplayer games. Cheating runs the gamut from exploiting in-game bugs

to the scourge of first-person shooters, aimbots and wallhacks, which automatically aim at an opponent or show their position on the map

Now, for our foray into cheating, we went with the Kronos Zen, a little box that runs $199.99 at retailers like Best Buy and Walmart

Compared to the most advanced game-breaking cheats, this is on the tame side. It ramps up the in-game aim assist to give you that sticky feeling

and it massively reduces recoil. When we shoot without the Kronos active, our shots follow a

specific pattern. When it's on, we have pinpoint accuracy. But don't expect to plug this baby in

and become elite right away. Nope. First, we need the most updated code running on it. That required

a trip to YouTube where we found Lethal Panda, a purveyor of artisan Kronos scripts. For between

$25 and $120 a month, we could access several developed models that worked best in whatever

game we wanted. These models even came with full tutorial videos attached in case his

YouTube channel got taken down. On Zeta channel he recently made the Neuromuscular Aimbot He uses an external computer to read what is on the screen and a TENS device to force his arm to move when an enemy appears

If you've ever used a TENS unit that does the arm thingy, it doesn't feel good

All right, guys, so I'm not cheating. I do have a program running that will electrocute my trigger finger if I'm on their head

Do you think that should be considered cheating? Not valid. All right, cool

If I was going to be in a court of law and I was going to argue what I'm doing

I would say that I've developed a really complex gaming mouse, and until you ban this mechanic, I'm going to keep using neuromuscular aim assist

Many of today's most popular games take advantage of the games-as-a-service model

where publishers rely on micro-transactions to make money. As an example, Fortnite is free to play, but it sells skins, in-game items

and a season pass, which rewards a player as they gain experience

We actually did a whole piece on microtransactions after Kim Kardashian's free-to-play game shut down

You can view that in the article below or in the video description if you're watching on YouTube

Players are going to be a lot less likely to commit to a game, to keep playing it

and particularly to commit to buying any in-game items if someone who's just got a cheat is going to blow their head off every time they appear

It's just a fact. During our experiment with the Corona Cent, we used Call of Duty to measure how much better the device made us

and the results are pretty solid. During 20 games of multiplayer without the Kronos

our accuracy was 18.5%. But for 20 multiplayer games with cheats, we hit an average of 21.2%

While a 3% increase sounds really nice, it pales in comparison to the top players from the Call of

Duty League this year. So it doesn't look like we'll be going pro anytime soon. For an industry

approaching $200 billion annually, stopping cheaters is a priority. Cheating is, like video

games is a global industry so naturally it is a hard thing for a publisher to get a hold of

particularly when you start when you start dealing in the jurisdictions where frankly IP doesn't

matter much uh the cease and desist don't matter much and it is a business and there are cheap

developers and their sort of retailer distributions which are enormous so there are a lot of different

parties working together to create those gray markets professors from the university of

Birmingham in the UK, Marius Mench and Tom Chathia, along with PhD student Sam Collins

published research earlier this year which found the top 80 cheat websites make nearly $75 million

each year. They detail the professional nature of these massive cheat networks. In many cases

a developer writes the code, then a distributor sells it on a marketplace, then there's often a

support infrastructure and community on a service like Discord. In our experiment, we found Lethal

Panda apparently handles most of this himself. But if a gamer wants to go to a site like Battlelog.gg

they can get cheats for all of the biggest games, and they accept payment by major credit cards

and some of the biggest cryptocurrencies Most of this is conducted in PC gaming which has become a major issue for all gamers as cross between console and computer games has put everyone in the same lobbies While cheats let players feel accomplished they also serve an academic purpose Getting students to hack games

means they've got to learn all the core principles of cybersecurity, and they have a lot of fun while

they're doing it. Some of the most effective cheats and anti-cheat software operate in a

computer's kernel, the core of the operating system that controls everything. So I've been

using game hacking for teaching for quite a while and then i came across what the anti-cheat

companies were doing some of their defense mechanisms defense mechanisms are really advanced

they're making great protections which are which counters a lot of malware too i think the publishers

are getting they're putting much more attention on it and they're getting more successful because

it's got much more difficult for them to to create and sell cheats which last for any longer

and this will seem pretty bizarre, but last any longer than two days without stopping working

There are different ways to implement cheats. Software cheats run programs on the same computer as the game

But more advanced hardware cheats could entail plugging in a separate computer into a gaming PC

through a special card that provides direct access to the computer's memory

That can get expensive for cheaters. And speaking of costly, Zeta built out Waldo, an AI that yzes clips to detect cheating

He says all games could without a doubt catch cheaters with the right AI model

I've spoken with a machine learning expert. And I said, listen, if we had $3 billion and could train one model to detect cheating in every video game

his answer was that he's extremely confident that it would work. You can have a model that knows the difference between the human aiming and aim assisted human aiming with extreme certainty

It just takes a lot of money. It would also take an incredible amount of processing power

You can make gaming a good, enjoyable experience again with enough money dumped into a well-made AI model

Since we're not even close to the upper echelon of players, I don't think anyone suspected us of cheating

But it's hard to know for sure. It's also anxiety-inducing to have to worry about whether this little device on our desk

will end up getting us banned from a game we love. And that comes up every time you try it with a new game

because we just don't know if they've upgraded their anti-cheat to catch it. It surely gave us advantages

but it still didn't help the fact that I'm just not that precise. And the Cronus wasn't giving full-blown aimbot levels of success

But I can see how someone who is already good at the game would get exponentially better without having to deal with things like recoil

But honestly, while it was a great excuse to play more video games, we're putting the Cronus on the shelf for now

Guess that means we just need to get good. For Straight Arrow News, I'm Brent Jabbour

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