Playatation2 Game Cheats | Free Cheat Codes Article

Preventing Gaming Cheats

Game developers and third party software developers have developed technologies that attempt to prevent gamers from cheating. Anti-cheating software is most commonly used in popular first person shooters such as Half-Life and its various mods or Quake. A few examples of anti-cheat software are PunkBuster, Cheating-Death, Valve Software's VAC ("Valve Anti-Cheat"), Argus Anti-Cheat, and RSVP First.

Some companies opt to ban suspected cheaters from their servers. When this is done by blacklisting the game's serial key, the player is often effectively prevented from playing the game they purchased online. Blizzard Entertainment and Valve Software have banned gamers, though the actual number is unknown. These companies also chose not to restrict these players to "cheating allowed" servers.

Sometimes the anti-cheating disgust leads to embarrassment, such as when Phil DeLuca, America's Army executive producer, compared cheating to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and threatened to report incidences to the FBI and Secret Service.

However, it might not be financially beneficial for a company to fight cheating in its games. Duplicate users are frequently banned in free games but they bring in revenue just like normal players in fee-based games that require subscriptions. Gamers have surmised that this is the reason why "two boxing" is not a bannable offense in major MMORPGs. Players are often less concerned about these circumstances because it is debatable if the actions in question are a form of cheat.

It could be argued, however, that when a game developer does not take cheating to heart, they could likely be shortening the lifespan of their games. Some gamers have indicated that recent games that have no serious anticheat are not high on their list of games to purchase, while games that do have some sort of anticheat system are more likely to be purchased.

On the other hand, those that do cheat at these games might view the issue the other way, and choose games that have little to no anticheat protection. Regardless of one's take on the issue, the position a company takes on cheating could have a large impact on whether one will decide to buy a game or not. For this reason, a game company is left to consider the cost of working towards stopping cheating vs the cost of ignoring cheats.