This is such a weird take. In an online multiplayer game the cheaters are the risk to the company's bottom line.
If a game is rampant with cheaters, honest paying players stop showing up, and less new players sign up. The relatively small percentage of cheaters cost the company tons of sales and revenue.
It is actively in a company's best interest to do everything they possibly can to prevent cheating, so the idea that intentionally building sub-par anti-cheat is about "prioritising their bottom line" seems totally absurd to me.
Not to mention these abstract "the company" positions completely ignore all the passionate people who actually make video games, and how much most of them care about fair play and providing a good experience to their customers. No one hates cheaters more than game developers.
> because most companies will make decisions based on time/effort/profitability, and because client-side anticheat is stupid simple and cheap, that's what they go with. Why waste their own server resources, when they can waste the user's?
And my comment was a response to that statement. In context of that statement, companies are indeed choosing to prioritise their commercial interests in a way that increases the risk to the computers of their customers.
> Not to mention these abstract "the company" positions completely ignore all the passionate people who actually make video games
Irrelevant. Companies and their employees are two different distinct entities and a statement made about one does not automatically implicate the other. Claiming, for example, that Ubisoft enables a consistent culture of sexual harassment does not mean random employees of that company are automatically labeled as harassers.
Coming to anti-cheat, go ahead and fight them all you want. That's not a problem. Demanding the right to introduce a security backdoor into your customer's machines in order to do that, is the problem.
If a game is rampant with cheaters, honest paying players stop showing up, and less new players sign up. The relatively small percentage of cheaters cost the company tons of sales and revenue.
It is actively in a company's best interest to do everything they possibly can to prevent cheating, so the idea that intentionally building sub-par anti-cheat is about "prioritising their bottom line" seems totally absurd to me.
Not to mention these abstract "the company" positions completely ignore all the passionate people who actually make video games, and how much most of them care about fair play and providing a good experience to their customers. No one hates cheaters more than game developers.