Cheating Online Games

Defeating Piracy by Going Online

One easy way to prevent simple piracy such as copying is not to distribute anything to copy. That is, if a majority of your game resides on a central server, it cannot be copied easily. Most modern game companies have adopted this strategy to prevent trivial game cracking. Almost all require gamers to play the game online using only supported servers. These online servers, at the very least, can check a local copy of the game client (running on the gamer’s PC) for a legitimate serial number or some other key.

Of course, online games also require an online account, implying that some kind of authentication is required to play the game. Note that this is a much clearer way to tie a game to a particular gamer than ...