Everyone wants to win a game, but not all the wins are legitimate. More and more cheats are being created to help players succeed in mobile games. This is undoubtedly one of the most persistent headaches for every mobile gaming app developer.
If you think your mobile game is safe from cheating, the results from our analysis will make you reconsider it… Keep on reading!
Denuvo by Irdeto conducted an internal analysis of available cheats for the top 50 mobile gaming apps. About 70% of them are online multiplayer games, which means any single cheat can have a significant negative effect on the entire gaming community.
We discovered that for 86% of the titles on this list, there is a cheat available! And what is more worrisome, these cheats are available for the latest version of 80% of the games. This indicates that cheating does not occur only once, at the release of a title. It is a systematic behavior that will advance concurrently with the development of your mobile gaming app.
Cheaters constantly come up with new tricks to break the rules and get an edge over other gamers. Therefore, no mobile game developers should feel safe in this battle. If 86% of mobile games have been cracked, then any game can be the next target!
Our analysis showed that only 22% of mobile developers of the examined titles employed anti-cheat solutions. This figure is trivial in light of the 86% of mobile games that have been compromised!
What is causing this situation?
Some game development studios are reluctant to take cheating seriously. This finding is consistent with what we discovered in last year’s survey. In it, roughly 10% of those questioned admitted to using anti-cheat services for their mobile games; a further 26% of them were aware of such game protection solutions but unwilling to use them. There are various reasons behind this resistance, but they all stem from a lack of awareness of how cheating has affected user engagement and revenue.
Meanwhile, to combat cheating, many developers rely on their internal team to constantly innovate their games, work on patches to detect and prevent unauthorized third-party software, as well as block dishonest gamers. However, stopping cheating in mobile games may hardly be achieved this way. Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) – the Indian version of PUBG Mobile – serves as an illustration of this. After releasing the 1.6.5 patch, cheating in BGMI was still out of control, regardless of multiple sanctions. The developer then had to release a new update in early 2022 to prevent players from modifying the gameplay with unauthorized codes, as well as routinely detect and ban cheating accounts. About 90,000 accounts were banned over two weeks from April 4 to 17 and this number will undoubtedly keep rising over time.
Fending off every possible cheat this way means spending a fortune – and not that many developers can afford to do it. A systematic defense – game protection software – is needed to deal with the evolution of cheats instead.
There is a variety of security features that can help you protect your mobile gaming app from such threats. These features include integrity verification, anti-debugging, hook detection, jailbreak/root detection and emulator detection.
The fight against cheating in mobile games is a protracted battle that is difficult to win by yourself. At Irdeto, we offer a one-stop mobile gaming protection with over 20 mobile game security plug-ins to meet your needs.
Contact us today to learn about the solutions that we can provide!
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