Imagine that you are in need of a quick cash.
You are an experienced developer. You know Windows internals well. You are already good at C++ and system/kernel programming. You are also a well-versed reverse engineer.
In consideration of the current status of the video game cheat market, you come to the realization that you can make a good sum of money by selling video game cheats.
Would you do it? Would it go against your principles?
What principles would this be going against? It’s a damn video game for rando’s, not a world class competition, right? While I personally see no point in paying more money to not play a game, I know there is a big market for it. Dive in! Make a few bucks!
First of all, is there truly a commercial video game cheat market??
I always thought that game hacks and mods were freely distributed by and for the gamer community, as part of the hacker ethic. Furthermore, it seems unethical, not to mention legally perilous, to try and profit from someone else’s game; if you are an experienced developer and want some cash, write your own game. People have raised 6-7 figures on Kickstarter for game development, and after it’s developed you can profit from sales.
Not really. There are online games (such as FPS shooter games like Rainbow Six Siege, Counter Strike Global Offensive) where online competition is high. If you make a cheat publicly available, the cheat will get blacklisted by the anti cheat software within 24 hours.
In that case, all other considerations aside, if you publicly sell such a cheat it will be blacklisted and worthless within 24 hours. And if you don’t make it generally available, you won’t be able to sell any number of copies anyway. So where is the demand under this scenario?
People who are selling cheats are creating slots for customers. They choose who can be their customers. Everything is trust based. Some sellers require you to provide an ID verification via video chat etc. The reason for this is some anti-cheat software developers buy pay-to-cheat software and blacklist them. In order to prevent this, they created a trust-based and slot-based system.
So, selling cheats is not really a public thing. It depends on the video game, of course.
There are black markets on the internet where you can search for cheat software sellers. Finding such platforms is also not easy. Hence, it is not that “public”.
I hope I clarified your questions.
I can’t imagine having that sort of skill and deciding to use them in that manner. It seems like a lot of work to be available for the idiots who would buy such things while being somewhat inaccessible to the smart people who try to stop such sales.
But maybe if programming skillz were suddenly not sought after anywhere else in society …
Word gets around on forums, Discord, etc. Back in the early days of PUBG, there was some heavy cheating to the point where cheat-sellers were putting the hack’s name into their handle as advertising so you knew you were beaten by someone running the cheat. And that went on for weeks (if not longer) before anything was done because it takes more than 24 hours for the game’s coders to figure out where the problem is and how to fix it.
Why? It is about getting extra cash.
1.) Why do you think it is a lot of work? Sellers just need to follow certain principles and steps to remain private.
2.) Why are buyers idiots?
How do you know these programmers are not employed? This hacking selling thingy is just for extra cash purposes. Developers are going to sacrifice their free time outside their work to create the cheat software product. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are not employed.
Well, you are paying money to risk getting your (paid) account banned for the sake of internet bragging points (that you don’t even deserve because you didn’t actually “git gud”)
I suppose if you were going to win a bajillion dollars in the Pew-Pew Shooter Invitationals or sell a heap of MMORPG gold, you could argue that the risk was worth the possible reward but, for personal home use, it strikes me as a bit silly.
I know how to make the bugs in Galaga stop shooting.
$50, and this can be you too.
DM me for transaction details.
Game hacks are not illegal. Assuming you are not actually hacking into a network, causing damage to a system, or selling someone else’s code in violation of copyright or patent, I don’t see how what you’re doing is going to land you in legal trouble. It would be like selling corked bats; the MLB wouldn’t like it and would certainly go after players using them but wouldn’t have any legal way to go after you as the manufacturer/seller. (At least to my knowledge, though I am not a lawyer.)
So it then becomes a question of ethics. Would I feel guilty making and selling these tools? It depends on what I feel about those potentially harmed by it. I wouldn’t feel bad about cheaters getting caught and banned or otherwise disciplined. They knew the risks and they probably deserve it for cheating anyway.
What about the players who can’t compete without my hacks, and want to play the game fairly and honestly? Maybe a little, but it depends on the community. In my experience, the hyper-competitive folks who would care about not being first place aren’t the nicest people anyway. Toxicity and powergaming tend to go hand-in-hand. And it’s just a game. I suppose if the hack I provided did something like duplicating a resource and crashed the entire game that would not be something I’d want to do. I don’t want to ruin an experience for regular players just wanting to have fun in a hobby.
What about the people running the game and trying to make a profit? Eh, again anything that doesn’t tank the whole system isn’t likely to be that big of a deal. Destroying a game that people worked hard on isn’t something I’d want to do, and I can’t justify it by saying it’s their fault for being vulnerable to it. You can justify a lot of heinous acts that way. But a simple cheat that allows some people to advance faster, or get some edge in a competition? Not a big deal.
Whether or not I do it becomes a question of effort vs financial reward. If I have desperate no-lifers with lots of disposable income throwing cash at me to boost their progress a bit, and it only takes a few hours of coding and some occasional marketing? I guess I might do it. I’m not ruining people’s lives so I’d consider it. Though I figured out in college that coding isn’t my thing, so I doubt I’d ever actually do anything like that in real life. I’m not opposed to it in a moral sense, though.
I gave this some thought, as someone who has been gaming online for more than two decades, how would I feel about people making and selling hacks for online games I play? Honestly, I’ve never given it much thought. I’ve had a lot of disgust toward those using the hacks, and figure they deserve it if they get banned. But I never care about those making them because they’re not the people committing the acts.
As long as they aren’t in-game trying to spam their wares like gold-sellers. Then I hope some massive and painful misfortune befalls them.
there selling them now days?
I remember when Raymond tran’s trainer was created for diablo 1 it was so widely used and distributed and such a neat piece of work that he worked for blizzard for quite a while
What made his trainer so popular is it let you save your stuff on battlenet and helped get rid of the forced pvp aspect of it …
my favorite use of it was the early versions of it was you could turn on randomly spawned diablos on one or more floors (that was patched out really quick by blizz) … well I was playing by my self and some fools came in and robbed and killed me well I came back in and since I saved my stuff it wasn’t much of a loss …
well, what they didn’t know was I turned it on and let’s just say on floor 14 they met a nasty surprise… and couldn’t get their stuff back which was some nice stuff …(which I already duped for my use ) cause i closed the room
What was even funnier was they thought they were going to bitch about it in the chat and get sympathy …they did not the flaming was merciless …and ended up being banned for swearing and other such infractions
good times you just can’t have anymore …
I don’t have strong opinions on this matter, but it seems to me this is a little like saying that you have no problem with the manufacturers of landmines, because they’re not the people using them.
If game hacks literally killed children my opinion would be different.
Yes, obviously there is a (big) difference of degree. It just doesn’t seem logical to me to dislike gamers who use cheats/hacks, but think those who make that possible are perfectly fine. I mean sure, it would be nice if cheaters didn’t cheat - one way to accomplish that is to remove the source.
And what if they do? In Diablo II, for instance, one of the steps in “duping” (making duplicate copies of high-valued items) was to crash the servers. All of the many methods through the years had that in common: All that changed was how the servers were crashed. And I don’t know if anyone actually sold the hack for that itself, but they certainly sold the duped items that resulted from it.
Another popular hack was the “no CD key” hack, that let you play without having purchased a copy of the game. That one was even simpler: You published some other hack that (at least purportedly, and probably in realty) did something else that people valued (revealing the map before it was explored, say). And that hack also, when it’s run, reads the value of the CD key that you have saved somewhere on your computer, and sends it back to the pirate programmer. Who then accumulates a big list of those CD keys, and the “no CD key” hack then just tries keys from that list until it finds one that works (i.e., that isn’t at that moment being used by the original buyer, and that hasn’t yet been banned). That’s just plain theft, albeit theft only from the people who were unethical enough to install your first hack.
I agree it’s not logical. I’m just thinking back to remember my feelings during games where I knew people were cheating and for whatever reason the source of the cheats never bothered me.
Absolutely not. Hacks ruin the game experience for other players. Every time you cheat in a game and ruin a match for someone you are directly hurting them. I have no issue with trainers or single player modifications but not in multiplayer.
It also costs a ton of money to fight against this crap on the developer side.