A 2024 study compared client-side anti-cheat defenses in 11 competitive PC shooters and examined cheats sold for those games. Its evidence can help explain which defenses appeared more technically sturdy in the researchers’ comparison—but it does not establish a current, definitive ranking, and cheats were available for every game studied.
What did the anti-cheat study actually measure?
The paper, “Anti-Cheat: Attacks and the Effectiveness of Client-Side Defences”, by Sam Collins, Alex Poulopoulos, Marius Muench and Tom Chothia, was presented at CheckMATE ’24 and published in the 2024 workshop proceedings. The University of Warwick repository lists its publication date as 19 November 2024.
The researchers selected 11 popular competitive player-versus-player PC shooters with similar mechanics and commercial success. They assessed technical defenses and enforcement approaches, then compared that assessment with evidence about cheat availability, uptime and pricing in a sampled marketplace. The work is about Windows PC client software cheats—not every game, platform or way to cheat.
To identify sellers, the team used a recursive search process and retained sites with more than 5,000 monthly visits according to Similarweb, excluding sites that appeared outdated or unmaintained. They surveyed 80 sites and gathered more detailed game-level price and availability information from a sample of 21. Site traffic was averaged for August–October 2023. The paper excluded Escape from Tarkov because its penalty dynamics differed, and PUBG because the researchers could not obtain a fair PC-versus-mobile player-base figure.
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Which games have the best anti-cheat?
The study offers a comparative technical assessment of its selected titles, rather than a universal league table that can be safely applied to every game today. Its comparison considers the sturdiness of client-side defenses alongside the cheat techniques those defenses must address and the observed cheat marketplace. It does not support treating one feature—such as kernel-level access—as a complete measure of anti-cheat quality.
The paper’s abstract says, “Our findings suggest that prices for cheats are closely correlated to the technical sturdiness of the anti-cheat software they have to overcome.” That is an association in the researchers’ dataset, not proof that anti-cheat strength alone determines a cheat’s price. Popularity, demand and other market factors may also matter.
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Most importantly, the researchers found cheats available for all 11 games. A comparatively sturdy defense therefore does not mean a title is cheat-free, nor does the paper establish which game has the fewest cheaters in live play. Its findings describe selected client-side defenses and sellers observed during a bounded collection period; they are not a current performance guarantee.
Does kernel-level anti-cheat mean a game is cheat-free?
No. Kernel-level access describes where anti-cheat software can operate within a computer’s software stack; it is not, by itself, a guarantee that every cheat can be detected or stopped. The study’s comparison concerns a bundle of technical defenses, enforcement approaches and the cheat landscape, rather than a single architectural choice.
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The paper frames software cheating as a “man-at-the-end” attack: the attacker is the end user controlling the machine on which the game runs. Its scope excludes custom-hardware cheats and approaches such as server-side AI pattern recognition. Those exclusions matter because a client-side study cannot settle how well a game resists methods it did not assess.
How much money does the game-cheat market make?
From the 80 cheat-selling sites they surveyed, the study authors conservatively estimated combined annual revenue of $12.8 million to $73.2 million. The authors’ abstract describes this as revenue from selling these attacks; it is an estimate based on their dataset and assumptions, not a complete accounting of all cheat sales worldwide.
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The estimate should be read with the study’s sampling boundaries in mind. Because of legal and language differences, Chinese- and Korean-language sites were excluded, and most retained sites were in Europe and North America. The study also focused on client-side software cheats, not custom hardware or every other form of cheating. Its site information and prices reflect data collected in 2023, not a real-time view of the market.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How does Riot’s ban figure fit into the comparison?
Riot’s September 20, 2024 VALORANT anti-cheat update reported that Vanguard had banned more than 3.6 million accounts for cheating during its first four years—roughly one ban every 37 seconds, by Riot’s calculation. Riot said that total excludes additional action against botting, boosting and intentionally queueing with cheaters.
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That is useful context about one publisher’s enforcement, not an independent cross-game measure. It should not be compared directly with the study’s technical assessment or treated as proof that one game has more or fewer cheaters than another: the figures measure different things and come from different methods.
Quick Recap
What the study can—and cannot—tell players
- It can: compare selected client-side defenses across 11 competitive PC shooters and relate those defenses to cheat availability, uptime and prices observed in the sampled seller market.
- It cannot: certify that any title is cheat-free, provide a present-day ranking, or measure every platform, region, game or cheating method.
- Its market estimate is bounded: the 80-site survey and 21-site detailed sample omit parts of the market, while the collection period and geographic exclusions limit how broadly the figures apply.
- Its comparison is not a single-feature contest: kernel-level operation alone does not establish overall effectiveness, and the paper does not reduce its analysis to that feature.
