Games are ultimately just a giant database with images and sound. All games are ultimately spreadsheets, logic, progression, assets, and rules, all stored in lookup tables. The data in those files is the game. If it’s altered, so is the game itself. The integrity of that data is the integrity of the game and, when compromised, so is the player experience. 

Cheating in Video Games

Cheating has been a problem in gaming since time immemorial. From loaded dice to furtive rearrangements of Solitaire (why Grandpa, why?) to FPS hackers. The human desire to win can sometimes go way too far. If we cheat ourselves and only ourselves, then fair enough that’s up to us - but if we cheat others and ruin their experiences, that’s a moral failing. We bond through games, and cheating is antisocial at its very core.

Cheating in video games is both rife and perpetual. Play any major online game, and occasionally a lobby will be ruined by some invisible idiot on the other side of the map 180 no-scoping you the moment you peek from a wall. You will have the nagging feeling the opponent’s resources just aren’t running out, or that they know exactly where you are marching through the fog of war, or the cards you’re going to play, or the pieces you’re going to move. 

The worst thing is that even if opponents aren’t cheating, the fact they might be is a constant splinter in our enjoyment of any game - especially if we’re determined to get better at it. We feel constantly like the game world isn’t fair, not properly managed, or ultimately always going to be compromised. It makes us frustrated with its creators. 

Gamers hate cheaters. It stops us from playing. More worryingly for game devs, it stops us from paying. Even the mere specter of cheaters can lead to disillusionment - even if the actual amount of cheaters is far less than it feels like. That said, a recent paper put the number at 12% for the likelihood of a cheater in a given game. That means if you’re playing a 5v5 team battler, one person is likely cheating.

How Companies Try to Combat Cheaters

It’s a toxic problem for game companies, and one they spend enormous amounts of effort trying to solve, and employ enormously invasive anti-gamer practices to try and clamp down on cheaters. Riot demanded kernel-level access with their anti-cheat software. This means they, Riot, have a higher privilege access to your computer than you do. Imagine what they could do with that power, and what other companies have done - including turning player’s machines into Bitcoin miners without them knowing. There are legitimate privacy concerns too, with anti-cheat software collecting far too much data from users in the guise of trying to give them a positive gaming environment. 

That said, most game devs have absolutely no intention of harming their player base, they just want to provide powerful anti-cheat for their players. Instead of trusting invasive kernel software, verifiability at the edge can ensure trust without surveillance. This is exactly the kind of infrastructure we are Source Network champions. As it stands though, they’re stuck either with implementing overly invasive software, or using software or guesswork which is woefully inefficient at catching cheaters. It’s not easy to be sure. Despite the mathematical impossibility behind Dream’s Minecraft speedruns, it was still an ongoing drama for months and months about whether you could truly say he cheated. 

Ultimately, no matter how online a game is, a large chunk of game logic and assets live on the player’s local device. Cheaters can modify files, inject memory, spoof inputs easily. Server-side checks in gaming environments can’t track every micro movement, they have to somewhat trust the client machine. So they use heuristics like mouse speed, reactions and consistency - but this creates false positives and is invasive. You’re just guessing, not proving. For game companies trying to judge whether someone is good or hacking it’s the same Sisyphean labour of selection. 

There are more cheaters than time to identify and deal with them - and then they just go and buy a new copy and start a new account. Developers resort to AI to try and identify and ban cheaters, but there are too many false positives and bans start harming real honest customers of your game - a nightmare scenario. We don’t need better pattern recognition, we need better proof. A local-first stack that can verify the honesty of the game. 

Even a modest 2% error rate in AI-powered cheat detection software is unacceptable for most game developers. If your game has 100 million MAUs, like Fortnite does, that means 2 million might be banned by the system per month. There are anecdotal stories of developers (who, by virtue of making the game, are often quite good at it) being banned from their own games through overly zealous anti-cheat software. It’s clear these types of systems are not a long term solution.

Verifying the State of Play

Games are just big databases. Cheats are merely corruptions of it. This is where Source Network can provide a foundational stack for building anti-cheat software that always works and does not invade gamer’s privacy at the same time. By embedding DefraDB into the game client, developers can cryptographically verify the integrity of the player’s games files the moment they connect to an online lobby. If anything has been changed - wallhack, asset injection, rules logic - it can be flagged and rejected. This would require no intrusive monitoring of an end-user’s PC. The anti-cheat mechanism would exist entirely within the game files themself. Also, because the check is on the player’s device, and not a central server - then the anti-cheat scales with the game itself, and isn’t just a ballooning overhead. Best of all, it’s incontrovertible. The data in the game has been altered, end of - we can be sure.

Source Network is all about the delivery and access of verifiable data to power applications, and anti-cheat software is just one use case of many. By treating game data with the same integrity and respect we want to treat financial transactions, healthcare, and agriculture, we can give devs the tools to build powerful software utilities that take advantage of what on-device P2P data management enables. Local-First software isn’t just about principles, it’s about pragmatism - and anti-cheat gaming software is just one example of the type of utility Source Network’s stack can be used for. To be clear, we’re not building anti-cheat software - we’re building the data management wiring that lets other devs build it easily and fully aligned with the principles of sovereign, verifiable, privacy preserving data. 

To developers, it’ll almost feel like cheating. And though it may seem like our tech is magical - we swear we’re not hacking - and we can prove it!