About cheaters and profits of Infinity Ward.
I've been calculating the profits that cheaters might bring to Infinity Ward and Valve in my spare time... Mind if I share my thoughts with you?
*Sorry for such a long post. I just couldn't make it shorter %(*
Worldwide, there are approximately 200,000 active PC players in Modern Warfare 2. I could be wrong, but that’s fine. We're not preparing a financial report, right?
Now let's tally the cheaters. We'll only count those who use paid cheats because counting those who prefer freebies is quite impossible (at times like these, I wish I had psychic abilities).
On average, I know of about 20 websites selling cheats. Four of them are quite large communities, with more than 20,000 active subscribers. Let's assume that, conservatively, 1,500 to 3,000 people regularly play MW2 with cheats. In total, we already have about 8,000 cheaters (on average). The other sites are less popular and their products (i.e., cheats) are not of particularly high quality, so they don't have that many subscribers. Let’s take 500 cheaters per site. From 20, we subtract 4 (the very popular sites) and 500*16 = 8,000 people. In total, we now have 16,000 cheaters out of 200,000 players. That’s 8% of all players! Almost 1 in 10. That's quite a lot... Looks like my sleepy brain has made a mistake somewhere. But no, everything is correct.
200,000 - 100%
2,000 - 1%
16,000 / 2,000 = 8
Now let's get to the most interesting part. Specifically, let’s count other people's money.
Do you think Valve and Infinity Ward aren't fighting against paid cheats?... They are, and quite fiercely! They drive poor schoolkids to heart attacks. Remember I said that fighting against paid cheats is pointless? I was wrong. At the time of writing that post, I simply didn't possess the information I have now.
Previously, the VAC dev team had a specific budget and plan that they operated under. The plan looked something like this:
November. We buy cheats from fapfapfapcheats.com and ban the bastards to hell.
December. hacksforfags.net follows soon.
3...
And so on. Valve couldn't afford to spend much time on any one site, tracking all their updates. Thus, 2007-2009 were years of calm, allowing many currently popular sites to establish their business by promoting their cheats as the safest. Just a couple of months ago, getting banned while using their products was something close to a fantasy.
But the release of Modern Warfare 2 changed everything.
Can anyone clearly and succinctly say why there are no dedicated servers in the game? Let’s not start imitating the developers and feeding each other nonsense.
Do you really think that the people at Infinity Ward are so foolish that, creating, excuse me, their damn IWnet, they couldn't foresee that it would become a real breeding ground for parasites cheaters? Do you think they were so busy polishing the game and its PR that they forgot that aside from honest players, there are also dishonest ones?
Nonsense, friends. It’s like releasing a car without wheels and then telling a bewildered customer: “Oh, by the way, we completely forgot about them... But look at this interior, the electronics...”. No, seriously, how else should this be understood?
In Modern Warfare 2, there isn't even a basic option to exclude a cheater from the conference. And this isn't a bug or a mistake... This is done so that players feel COMFORTABLE, so that some upset noob doesn't kick a decent player, and other similarly upset noobs don't back him up.
It's just laughable. Infinity Ward themselves created conditions for cheaters. And if in other online games most cheaters try to play legit (i.e., not get caught because there are admins who can quickly give them the boot), after playing once in MW2, they realize that here they have complete freedom. No admins. No voting to kick and ban.
A cheater, disregarding the legit style, starts to just rape everyone without fear of punishment. Admit it, you’ve likely encountered such players at least once (100:1 and nuke in the finale). Why did Infinity Ward, damn them, allow this? They could have at least started accepting reports about cheaters.
It seems to me that they simply want more money. EVEN MORE. Is there ever such a thing as too much money?..
And IWnet and passive VAC only reinforce this assumption. Yes, I know, I'm contradicting what I said earlier, but this is just one of the hypotheses, which, by the way, many players voice when criticizing IWnet.
When it became known that there would be VAC in the game, the coders creating cheats were probably overjoyed. Almost on the first day after the game's release, the first paid cheats appeared.
“Ban? Lol, what the hell is a ban! After almost three years of calm?! VAC is garbage!”
But could they have suspected that during this time, Infinity Ward would begin to actively fund the VAC dev team... What changed? The team significantly expanded its staff and gained real potential to finally choke the life out of the cheating community while also raking in some cash (for some reason, it feels appropriate to use this term here).
A plan was developed with the goal of “down the hack companies.” The VAC dev team bought subscriptions to practically all paid cheats they were aware of. And all cheats, like a conveyor belt, ended up in the open maw of VAC.
<&zo`> Valve buys any and all hacks
<&zo`> russian or english, its all the same when its in a debugger
Indeed, all paid cheats will eventually find themselves in the debugger and then in the VAC database.
The first mass wave of bans occurred at the end of November (Two thousand five hundred?!). The VAC dev team simply kept track of the updates for each paid cheat, and as new builds (versions) were released, they immediately added them to VAC... Of course, breaking a tough nut with “antileak” wasn't easy. But considering what pros work at Valve, specifically the VAC dev team, I don't think they faced any significant difficulties dissecting the cheats. Certainly, it took a considerable amount of time, but now, with an expanded team, the process sped up significantly.
Let’s take a vivid example from the life of an imagined cheat community. There’s a site called superhacks.com (a fictional name for a fictional community) selling cheats for popular online games. superhacks.com gained considerable popularity among cheaters because in its two years of existence, there had been no bans in VAC games nor in games using PunkBuster. Then Modern Warfare 2 was released… The coders at superhacks.com immediately assembled a cheat, made flashy advertising, and posted their rage videos on popular video hosting sites. The number of subscribers who bought cheats for MW2 from them exceeded 3,000 people! Can you imagine!? 3,000!
Suddenly, one by one, subscribers receive bans. The forum is flooded with banreportthreads.
Panic. Panic!!! Panic!111!!!
“You promised us a 100% fail-safe cheat, wtf?” “Refund my money!!!”
The coders and administration of the site panicked seriously – this was such a blow to their nearly impeccable reputation. Naturally, they update the cheat. What does updating mean? Rebuilding it from scratch, changing file versions, the method of injecting into the game process (hook method). So, essentially, they have to rewrite the cheat again. Rebuild it, to be precise. They can’t know exactly what part of the cheat was added to the VAC database?
The cheat was updated. Cheaters relaxed, bought new keys, and continued playing as if nothing had happened, gradually forgetting about this incident. Meanwhile, the VAC dev team calmly downloaded the cheat updates and began poking around in its internals. And after a week, the situation repeated itself, though this time there were significantly more disgruntled customers.
“Are we beta testers or something?!”. “What do you think we pay you for, huh? We use free cheats, not pay for lousy assurance!”
This is no longer just a blow to the site's reputation. This is a KNOCKOUT
The coders at superhacks have no choice but to rebuild the cheat again... They won’t be able to do anything else. The VAC sample database may be on the client-side, but it’s not just a dark forest... It’s a real pain. Figuring it out (or in it, in pain? :D) is probably beyond anyone's capability except the VAC dev team themselves. Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant sits. So does every coder writing cheats want to know how VAC is structured. The only person who made any progress in poking around VAC is BlackDove. We owe him the significant amount of golden skulls in the game. Last week, BlackDove gave an interview to the site modernwarfail2.com, in which he talked about a vulnerability he found in Steamworks that allowed the complete disabling of VAC while still playing in Modern Warfare 2... By the way, I even translated this interview, but you, my friends, kind of reacted weakly to that post, and then it was completely buried under tons of copy-paste.
So what was I saying? Ah, yes. About superhacks.com...
So, they got banned twice, updated the cheat, and a week after the last update, everything repeated itself, but this time there was nearly a riot on the forum. The rats are fleeing the sinking ship. From 3,000 subscribers, more than half move to competitors (to hacksforfags probably), hoping that it won’t happen there. Naive... After the fourth wave of bans, the administration of superhacks.com announces that they are ceasing support for cheats for Modern Warfare 2.
1:0 in favor of Valve and Infinity Ward.
Meanwhile, another part of the VAC dev team storms the fortresses of another site. They take them down through attrition. I wonder how many bans they can handle?
By banning cheaters, Valve forces them to repeatedly buy new keys. In the West, games are mostly purchased through Steam. Because it is convenient, quick, and reliable. At the same time, a certain percentage of the 60$ price tag goes into Valve’s pocket (for using their digital distribution service).
And now for the numbers. We will only count copies sold through Steam, as here we can be sure that the money goes directly to the developer. Sales made in stores and through other digital distribution services will not be counted because the profit will not go to Infinity Ward, but to the resellers and wholesalers selling them...
What do we have? 3,000 subscribers after the first wave of bans bought new keys. Let's assume that 2,000 of them used Steam (the others either bought from stores or through dealers).
2000x60=120,000$ goes to Infinity Ward. We won't consider the percentage they share with Valve because I am not aware of it.
After the second wave of bans, the number of subscribers on superhacks.com decreased. Let’s assume that from 3,000 only 2,000 remained. This time, let’s say 1,000 people bought the game through Steam. 1000x60=60,000$.
After the third wave of bans, only about 500 people remained. There’s no point in counting anymore.
But since VAC dev team has finally gotten to superhacks.com and they now know how their cheats are structured, do you think they will stop there? After all, there are still cheats for CS 1.6, CSS, TF2 on superhacks.com... Why not tackle them? After all, in this case, they won’t have to share with Infinity Ward...
In summary: superhacks.com is done for, and Infinity Ward received an additional 200,000$ (let's round it off).
As I mentioned at the start of my post, there are about four large communities like superhacks.com.
200,000x4 = 800,000$.
We have 16 “smaller” sites left. We decided to take 500 people from each, which totals 8,000 cheaters. Let’s say they got banned 2 times. 60x2x8000=960,000$
That’s almost 2 million bucks! Can you believe it? Two million bucks in profits from cheaters! And this is just in less than a month and a half! Of course, right now, when MW2 is breaking all sales records, it doesn’t seem that significant, but in a couple of months when something like Bad Company 2 hits the shelves, MW2 will have to make room, and two million a month won't be excessive. Though no, I’ve already gone too far... Judge for yourselves: cheaters won’t be buying Modern Warfare 2 forever (one copy a week)? Certainly for some 16-year-old schoolboy James from New York, 60$ a week isn’t that much, but come on, he can’t spend all his cash on Modern Warfare 2 keys, can he? After several bans, he will most likely switch to another online game to quench his thirst for playing with cheats. Other cheaters will do the same. There’s no option to become a fair player.
However, don’t be too happy. Who knows, maybe Infinity Ward will stop funding the VAC dev team after the New Year? I read somewhere that IW just wants to create the illusion that everything is calm in Modern Warfare 2 before the New Year when many people will want to buy the game as a gift. But that’s foolish - the cheaters have significantly damaged the game’s reputation...
But if the VAC dev team doesn't loosen their grip and in six months, then it’s reasonable to assume that the number of cheaters will significantly decrease.
These are just my thoughts and nothing more.
P.S.: I intended to mention this at the beginning of the post, but I forgot... Remember the news about 2,500? If my calculations are correct, there were at least three times that many? Maybe they were subscribers from one site? Overall, I don’t know. Honestly. But I’m sure there were far more banned in the first wave.
P.P.S: Please, overlook the mistakes, typos, and missing words. At times I'm quite inattentive %(
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