Cheating Online Games

A Brief History of Cheating

Software piracy has been a problem in the computer games business ever since games moved from standalone machines in the 1970s to PCs in the 1980s. Game makers have justifiably gone to great lengths to thwart it. In the past, game makers added various countermeasures to their software to make games harder to “crack.” The main purpose was to prevent rampant copying, so that people who wanted to play the game had to buy it. In the end, these games were always cracked—but in some cases, the countermeasures delayed the release of a cracked version by days or even weeks. This delay earned real revenue for the game companies, because delaying a crack for even a week translated into hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. ...