Mobile Game Cheating: Lessons In App Security And Economy

There’s a new mindset developers are taking to manage an app economy rife with cheaters, and how it impacts everyone’s gaming experience.

- ZACHARY CHAN

I talked to Tom Tovar, the CEO of Appdome recently during Black Hat Asia 2023 about the evolution of mobile app security, the line between ‘innocent’ cheating in mobile games and outright fraud. I learned that there’s a new mindset developers are taking to manage an app economy rife with cheaters, and how it impacts everyone’s gaming experience.

01 HOW PREVALENT IS CHEATING IN MOBILE GAMES?

Mobile game cheating is widely prevalent, but there’s an interesting gray area in the cheating space. If you think about it, just purely from a developer standpoint, I want people to use my game. If they cheat, they’re still using my game. And so there is this kind of open discussion within the mobile developer community of whether all cheating is equal and whether we should allow some of it. Different game makers, different studios might take different views. And this is also kind of gotten even more complex when you think about the platforms that are used to cheat inside mobile games. These are things like Bluestacks, Nox, Nemu and other emulators. They have venture capitalists that have invested in them and brought those platforms mainstream. They actually bill themselves as somewhere to get a better game experience, even though it’s actually their methods inside of those platforms that can enable cheating in games.

02 SO THERE’S A GREY AREA. BUT IS THERE A LINE BETWEEN CHEATING AND FRAUD?