What’s the Industry Perception of Cheating, Tampering, & Piracy?

foreign [Music] perception of cheating tampering and perception is all right hello everybody can you guys hear me okay all right no should I be screaming more all right good um so today we're going to talk a little bit about uh the the perception of of cheating in piracy and that's based on us doing uh a survey a couple of months back

um before doing that so just in terms of outline the the intent with that presentation is to give you uh first of all a view as to what what is cheating in piracy um validating a little bit the viewers too is this a real thing um talking about the concerns and then diving into into some of the the details from them so there's perhaps three things that that you need to to keep in mind when you're you're actually developing and Publishing games the first is uh is cheating right it's about actually gaining an unfair advantage in in the games uh which typically expose the experience for the players um we should distinguish um cheating in in a single player game where you're basically cheating against yourself and that's okay it's all right to be unlocking things because it's too hard um versus in a multiplayer environment where you're really creating a prom for all the other players

um the second thing that you need to think about is is tampering and there's a lot of ways that is a problem but typically that comes in the form of a crack or a mod so think of for example in the in a mobile space it might be uh your mobile banking game is monetized through in-app purchases and ads and these are basically removed and then there's a modded version of the app that's published online so that people can play your game without giving you any scent whatsoever and that's that's obviously a big problem for you as as a game developer and piracy is typically seen as the act of of leveraging that that tempered version um so what what we did uh in preparation to to this event was was analyze the top top 50 games on on the Google Play Store um specifically looking at you know roughly 60 uh basically

cheating cheating and cracking sites that there is a uh or the top top ones and what we discovered is the vast majority of the uh the games that are in the top 50 are basically today cracked and fascinatingly it's not only all the versions even the newest versions of the Games published are basically cracked and it's it's possible to find a version out there where cheating is possible where the uh the the in-app purchases can be uh uh accessed without without any any money being given um you can see the so same thing pirated versions you can see that the memory editors are also available for some of the games although a bit less in instances what we see on mobile is typically people tend to uh to mod the game and then publish the modded version so that it's easy for for the for the community to be able to access the game without without any effort

now just to talk a little bit about the impact what we what we also did was a survey we surveyed about 10 000 people around the world to understand how people actually care about cheating in general um about 60 percent of them said that they actually had witnessed cheating in the game um and I think that that is probably a low estimate in my opinion because I think anybody that's gaming today must have seen or witnessed uh some level of cheating against against them at this point um what is perhaps the more interesting and important data point is that the the majority of people that have faced cheating are very clear on the fact that they don't want to continue playing that game at that point uh and certainly will not want to pay uh to to spend more money in the game so cheating really impacts the business of of game positions and that's that's really really important to to face it uh head on other consequence

um is it however a misconception I think there's there's perhaps a view that that cheating is only something that's that that happens on PC and yes there is a lot on PC and there's if you if you start actually doing a bit of research uh that's probably the games that are actively cheated on are probably most most on PC because that's the most open platform there is um but that's certainly not the exclusive platform and if you start searching a bit more then you realize even even games like Pokemon Go is is full of cheaters at this point and that's you know that's on mobile and it's also about uh for example cheating the location um there's uh even so game on mobile like Apex Legend that's been suffering quite quite a bit or all more recently I guess Diablo um or pubg mobile so I think the message is it doesn't actually matter which

platform it is whether that's mobile or PC or even console in practice if there is if there is an advantage to be gained in cheating or hacking then people will try that's just the reality of the market so what we did is we started actually asking our basically the the publishing Community um you know what what they saw as key concerns and what you see is that when it comes to cheating the vast majority of the people see that it's uh it's a reduction in in engagements right so people people see cheating then they'll be spending less less time in the game but people don't necessarily see the immediate impact in Revenue which is which is perhaps um perhaps a problem because you know engagement has a direct direct correlation to revenue in practice um the then we we started engaging uh on on

trying to understand the level awareness in the PC and mobile space for the game Publishers as to if they understood and knew about about the uh the game protection Technologies what is fascinating to me is if you look at at the data the uh the the PC basic Publishers tend to understand and value protection again perhaps because it's the most open platform and therefore the one that suffered for many years more but the mobile Community the mobile development Community hasn't that necessarily yet understood uh or recognized that that there is a problem that that that there needs to be solutions that need to be applied in practice um specifically if you go into into the reasons why you will see that the teams tend to not really be convinced that the problem is going to be solved which which is

interesting they suspect and think and that again that's a myth that is expensive that there is no need for it or that is going to impact the performance and perhaps the the other one that's worth highlighting is that they they actually think that the technology is really tricky to implement again these are these are interesting because these are perceptions from from the uh the the development community oop I go back all right um in practice um if you if you well in our case so when we surveyed we surveyed actually across the industry so that wasn't specific to to the Nova for example um it uh it what what came out is that most people were were actually super happy with with the technologies that they employed across the board so if you started applying some security

Technologies you actually see the results is uh it's kind of the takeaway um the the positives including the ease of use and it actually wasn't as expensive as as perhaps they thought uh before looking at it and it really helped with their revenue um and it created a much more loyal base of customers in practice the it seems I'm going super fast better so that's good it's going to give us some time for discussion the that's the final thought right so what I did is I I decided to put a case study out there um so that's a super plus is an indie developer based in in Finland in November last year they decided to say hey we have we actually have cheating proms our games are being basically modded and and and people can actually play at either cheat or actually can can find ways to not not generate any revenue for us

um so the game the game was called Hills or east called Hills of Steel um they've applied the technology um it it was so easy and so effective that since then they decided to apply that on every single game that they have out there and that's kind of the point the point is what what when you start actually looking at security Technologies what you realize is that the revenue tends to go up quite a lot as a consequence of actually blocking piracy and cheaters um and that's that's a really big value ad for your business and that was it actually that's really short see I'm helping actually gain gain time on this one so if you have any questions there's there's this email uh but I think we still have actually some questions from there right well uh I think given how uh effective yes um we've got a uh we've got a fireside chat coming up next uh so but it'd be

great to uh if anyone has any initial questions now let's get to it otherwise I will go through our five side chats and you guys can pitch in as When You Wish as a do we have any initial questions from the audience nope yeah