00:00One more on the map, and just like that, game time!
00:05Baby, let's go!
00:07Video games are an escape for the majority of Americans these days.
00:10But like many things in life, one person can ruin the experience for the rest of us.
00:15Let's get something else to aim for ya.
00:17GREAT!
00:23Cheating in online games has become so widespread,
00:26it actually supports a grey market worth tens of millions of dollars each year.
00:30Now, in an attempt to better understand how it all works,
00:33we decided to break bad ourselves,
00:35spending two weeks as a video game cheater,
00:37taking part in the micro-economy of cheats,
00:39and we'll see if it really made a difference.
00:41We'll also dive into how big the cheating problem is for developers and publishers,
00:45what makes people want to cheat in the first place,
00:48and what happens if or when someone gets caught.
00:51I've always enjoyed video games specifically for the competition.
00:54I'm Nicholas Zetta, better known as Basically Homeless on YouTube.
00:58It's like your ability to use coordination in a way that's better than the other person
01:04is kind of a, you know, there's a competitive aspect to that that's just enjoyable to me.
01:08Nick Zetta amassed more than 2 million subscribers by producing videos building crazy gaming setups
01:13like a horse-powered PC and outlandish video game cheats.
01:17My mom actually would only let me play 30 minutes a day as a kid,
01:20but I think that led to, like, an unhealthy desire to just want to play more video games.
01:26My channel started because my friends talked me into making gaming videos
01:31because, you know, we all played video games together, we were pretty good, it was pretty funny,
01:34and so I just started clipping it up.
01:36The qualities that make video games so popular are the very same reasons some gamers turn to cheating.
01:41Video games in general have three core competencies that people really enjoy.
01:46One, autonomy, right? You have an independence to make a decision.
01:50Two, competency. I can be good at something and I will have metrics to show that I'm good at something.
01:58And three, community. I can meet people and be with people and not go through what I have to in the real world to be in that community.
02:07Dr. Sud says playing single-player games can meet one or two of those core competencies,
02:11but a competitive, online game can hit all three.
02:14And game developers have spent a lot of time and money keeping players engaged.
02:19You play Call of Duty, you get a kill.
02:22Right immediately, it's like plus 100 EXP, right? Boom.
02:25It's like yellow, highlighted, like, boom, it shows up.
02:28The on-screen fireworks don't end after the game either.
02:31In fact, in a game like Call of Duty, we were inundated with alerts and progression for minutes after games ended.
02:36In the weeks leading up to Halloween, there were several events going on, doling out rewards for more time played.
02:42And all of that triggers a main dopamine producer in the brain.
02:46That fires up that kind of, we call this the ventral tegmental area in the nucleus accumbens.
02:54There's this whole circuit pathway.
02:56Every time that occurs, it makes a person feel more competent at what they're doing, right?
03:03Think about that in the real world.
03:05What would that mean?
03:06Every time, you know, you did something well at the cashier register, if you're a cashier, and then it's like, boom, indication.
03:13You have just, you know, increased $3 to your checking account.
03:17You would see people jumping immediately.
03:21And all of that is amped up when players cheat because they're getting more of those good notifications, while also dealing with the adrenaline of being naughty.
03:29But players on the up-and-up can end up feeling dejected.
03:32I would say right now, like 30 to 40% of people in most competitive video games are using some sort of cheat.
03:38So there really isn't this solid way to have competition anymore.
03:43Cheats have always been a part of gaming.
03:45You know, cheat codes were shared in magazines and then newsletters and things.
03:49Various products were sold, which helped you cheat on consoles, for example.
03:54I'm Andrew Hogan. I am the co-founder and chief revenue officer of Intorca.
04:01We help publishers by providing them with intelligence that we gather that will help them deal with those people trying to attack their games by selling and sharing cheats and similar sort of exploits.
04:16Now, for the early video game connoisseur, codes were their first entrance into the world of cheats.
04:21One of the most famous, the Konami or Contra code, entering the sequence up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start on the title screen of the 1980s classic Contra would give you 30 lives instead of the standard three.
04:35These types of codes weren't meant to be cheats. They were tools for developers to use.
04:38If a developer is testing a game, they don't want to have to restart after dying three times.
04:43Cheating became an issue with the rise of online gaming, and in particular, online multiplayer games.
04:50Cheating runs the gamut from exploiting in-game bugs to the scourge of first-person shooters, aimbots and wallhacks, which automatically aim at an opponent or show their position on the map.
04:59Now, for our foray into cheating, we went with the Kronus Zen, a little box that runs $199.99 at retailers like Best Buy and Walmart.
05:07Compared to the most advanced game-breaking cheats, this is on the tame side.
05:11It ramps up the in-game aim assist to give you that sticky feeling, and it massively reduces recoil.
05:17When we shoot without the Kronus active, our shots follow a specific pattern.
05:21When it's on, we have pinpoint accuracy.
05:24But don't expect to plug this baby in and become elite right away.
05:27Nope.
05:28First, we need the most updated code running on it.
05:30That required a trip to YouTube, where we found Lethal Panda, a purveyor of artisan Kronus scripts.
05:35For between $25 and $120 a month, we could access several developed models that worked best in whatever game we wanted.
05:42These models even came with full tutorial videos attached in case his YouTube channel got taken down.
05:48On Zeta's channel, he recently made the neuromuscular aimbot.
05:57He uses an external computer to read what is on the screen, and a TENS device to force his arm to move when an enemy appears.
06:03If you've ever used a TENS unit that does the arm thingy, it doesn't feel good.
06:07All right, guys, so I'm not cheating.
06:10I do have a program running that will electrocute my trigger finger if I'm on their head.
06:15Do you think that should be considered cheating?
06:17No, that's valid.
06:18All right, cool.
06:19If I was gonna, in a court of law, and I was gonna argue what I'm doing, I would say that, like, I've developed a really complex gaming mouse, and until you ban this mechanic, I'm gonna keep using neuromuscular aim assist.
06:32Many of today's most popular games take advantage of the games as a service model, where publishers rely on microtransactions to make money.
06:39As an example, Fortnite is free to play, but it sells skins, in-game items, and a season pass, which rewards a player as they gain experience.
06:47We actually did a whole piece on microtransactions after Kim Kardashian's free-to-play game shut down.
06:52You can view that in the article below or in the video description if you're watching on YouTube.
06:56Players are gonna be a lot less likely to commit to a game, to keep playing it, and particularly to commit to buying any in-game items if someone who's just gonna cheat is gonna blow their head off every time they appear.
07:10It's just a fact.
07:11During our experiment with the Kronos Zen, we used Call of Duty to measure how much better the device made us.
07:17And the results are pretty solid. During 20 games of multiplayer without the Kronos, our accuracy was 18.5%.
07:24But for 20 multiplayer games with cheats, we hit an average of 21.2%.
07:29While a 3% increase sounds really nice, it pales in comparison to the top players from the Call of Duty League this year.
07:35So it doesn't look like we'll be going pro anytime soon. For an industry approaching $200 billion annually, stopping cheaters is a priority.
07:43Cheating is, like video games, is a global industry. So naturally, it is a hard thing for a publisher to get a hold of.
07:51Particularly when you start dealing with jurisdictions where, frankly, IP doesn't matter much.
07:56The cease and desist don't matter much. And it is a business.
08:00And there are cheap developers and their sort of reseller distributions, which are enormous.
08:05So there are a lot of different parties working together to create those grey markets.
08:10Professors from the University of Birmingham in the UK, Marius Mench and Tom Chathia, along with PhD student Sam Collins,
08:17published research earlier this year which found the top 80 cheat websites make nearly $75 million each year.
08:24They detail the professional nature of these massive cheat networks.
08:27In many cases, a developer writes the code, then a distributor sells it on a marketplace,
08:32then there's often a support infrastructure and community on a service like Discord.
08:36In our experiment, we found Lethal Panda apparently handles most of this himself.
08:40But if a gamer wants to go to a site like Battlelog.gg, they can get cheats for all of the biggest games.
08:46And they accept payment by major credit cards and some of the biggest cryptocurrencies.
08:50Most of this is conducted in PC gaming, which has become a major issue for all gamers,
08:55as cross-play between console and computer games has put everyone in the same lobbies.
08:59While cheats let players feel accomplished, they also serve an academic purpose.
09:04Getting students to hack games means they've got to learn all the core principles of cybersecurity.
09:09And they have a lot of fun while they're doing it.
09:12Some of the most effective cheats and anti-cheat software operate in a computer's kernel,
09:17the core of the operating system that controls everything.
09:20So I've been using game hacking for teaching for quite a while.
09:24And then I came across what the anti-cheat companies were doing.
09:27Some of their defense mechanisms are really advanced.
09:32They're making great protections, which counters a lot of malware too.
09:36I think the publishers are getting, they're putting much more attention on it and they're getting more successful
09:41because it's got much more difficult for them to create and sell cheats which last for any longer,
09:48and this will seem pretty bizarre, but last any longer than two days without stopping working.
09:53There are different ways to implement cheats.
09:56Software cheats run programs on the same computer as the game.
09:59But more advanced hardware cheats could entail plugging in a separate computer into a gaming PC
10:04through a special card that provides direct access to the computer's memory.
10:08That can get expensive for cheaters.
10:10And speaking of costly, Zeta built out Waldo, an AI that analyzes clips to detect cheating.
10:16He says all games could without a doubt catch cheaters with the right AI model.
10:21I've spoken with a machine learning expert and I said,
10:28listen, if we had $3 billion and could train one model to detect cheating in every video game,
10:34his answer was that he's extremely confident that it would work.
10:38You can have a model that knows the difference between the human aiming
10:44and aim assisted human aiming with extreme certainty.
10:51It just takes a lot of money.
10:53It would also take an incredible amount of processing power.
10:56You can make gaming a good, enjoyable experience again
11:00with enough money dumped into a well-made AI model.
11:04Since we're not even close to the upper echelon of players,
11:07I don't think anyone suspected this of cheating.
11:09But it's hard to know for sure.
11:11It's also anxiety inducing to have to worry about whether this little device on our desk
11:15will end up getting us banned from a game we love.
11:17And that comes up every time you try it with a new game,
11:20because we just don't know if they've upgraded their anti-cheat to catch it.
11:23It surely gave us advantages,
11:25but it still didn't help the fact that I'm just not that precise.
11:28And the Cronus wasn't giving full-blown aimbot levels of success.
11:31But I can see how someone who was already good at the game
11:34would get exponentially better without having to deal with things like recoil.
11:38But honestly, while it was a great excuse to play more video games,
11:41we're putting the Cronus on the shelf for now.
11:43Guess that means we just need to get good.
11:45For Straight Arrow News, I'm Brent Jabor.
11:47For more in-depth reporting, download the Straight Arrow News app or head to san.com.
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