Forming a Partnership With and Antivirus Company to Provide Anti-Cheat Protection

One of the problems with anti-cheat applications, such as Punkbuster, Valve's Anti-Cheat, etc., is that they really don't work that well. They are fairly easy to circumvent if you know what you are doing. And developing a comprehensive, effective anti-cheat application that keeps up with ever-evolving cheat applications, in house, requires more resources than a small game development studio has access to.

However, cheat applications are really a form of malware, and there are companies whose entire business is to keep on top of, detect, and eliminate malware, and that is anti-virus companies. Has anyone in the industry ever thought of approaching an internet security company, such as Avast, AVG or the makers of Nod32, and asking to form a partnership to combat cheat applications?

The questions that immediately come to mind are, what would such an application look like, and what would a company like Avast, AVG or ESET get out of such a partnership, that would make it worth their while? Because obviously, a company like Portalarium does not have deep pockets.

In answer to the first question, I would suggest a light application, similar to that used by the free online ESET virus scanner. It would only scan the boot sector and running applications. I would also require some form of live scanning to scan applications that are started after the initial scan when the application is started. The cheat applications would simply be added to the library of virus and malware definitions. It is important in my opinion that both malware and cheat applications are scanned for, so for the most part the anti-virus software would act much as it always does.

If the game application is active and a cheat application detected, the virus scanner would throw up a warning, shut the cheat application down, and present the usual options to deal with malware. The only difference is that even if the cheat application is white listed, the anti-virus application would shut it down if the game application it is providing a service for is running.

Presumably that by itself could be enough, with no action taken against the offending client, or if it is felt that further action is necessary, the anti-virus application could forward account and cheat application information to the game developer.

So the question is, what does the anti-virus service provider get out of this? It would be simple enough to allow the service provider to offer the option ("opt in") to install the full version of their anti-virus/security software. So the anti-virus service provider would in effect get free advertising. On top of this, one would also think that providing anti-cheat services to a historically important online game such as SotA would be something that they could use in advertising in other ways, and might be the doorway to them offering similar services to other game development studios.

On top of that, I think it would be significant, from a public relations point of view, that the game developer could legitimately claim that they are offering a worthwhile service, as all forms of malware would be detected.

 

I woould defer to the developers to answer this question since I have no basis to provide a response.