> Why does this pose an issue in game-hacking? Well.. As we all know, game-hackers go to extreme lengths to achieve their common goal: winning. This is the sad reality of the cat-and-mouse game of game-hacking, as cheaters will not abide by any rules or morals.<p>I feel like this is a flawed basis of assumption and also just a mis-framed situation as a whole. Cheat developers and the people that use them en-masse aren't really the same people. By trying to suspend their narrative on player greed being the enemy, they undermine a point that otherwise has some very practical responses if you don't resort to relative extremism.<p>For one, if exploiting software to win was the ultimate degenerative goal of every video game, I don't think people would want to pay for online experiences. People still buy and play games because they like the intended experience, and while cheating exists it's a one-sided aberration that isn't an obvious by-product of an endless greed for winning. I don't like cheaters, but any businessman will tell you that one person's abuse of a service is no excuse to degrade another customer's experience.<p>For two, this isn't casus-belli on privacy even if it was true. All software can be exploited, but that doesn't justify creating infinitely hostile conditions for a user to run your program. This same line of reasoning, blaming the cheaters and never yourself, could be used to justify any number of nonsense mitigations like forcing players to record themselves with a webcam or plug in proprietary anticheat USB hardware. This is all a very flowery way for a developer to absolve themselves of responsibility for an extreme reaction to a minor issue.<p>For three - it's deflecting the issue onto a conflated group of people that doesn't really exist. The people designing exploits are motivated to do so because they like writing exploits, not because they enjoy cheating. They might sell their software or distribute it to people that <i>do</i> play to cheat, but the cheat designers are rarely motivated by a desire to be at the top of a leaderboard that will boot them off for obvious manipulation. So the entire concept of blaming the players for wanting to win so bad is really just an emotional "we're the poor developers" deflection. They can try to hold the moral high ground all they want, but it ends up feeling like an incensed defense of something that clearly isn't working.