Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems

Chapter 2. Game Hacking 101

Figure . 

Software piracy has long been a problem in the computer games business—ever since games moved from stand-alone machines in the 1970s to PCs in the 1980s. Game makers, justifiably, have gone to great lengths to thwart piracy. 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 ...