The Chinese police got help from none other than the tech company that slowly gets more and more presence internationally (Tencent).

The BBC reports that a video game cheat operation, known as Chicken Drumstick, has been shut down after the Chinese police worked together with Tencent. According to the police, this is the world’s biggest cheating operation if we look at the company’s revenue and the games they handled.

Going with subscription fees for Overwatch and Call of Duty, they roughly got 76 million dollars in revenue, and the operation was present in many countries and regions with different pricing. One example was ten dollars a day, while another tier cost 200 dollars a month. Aside from the ten people that were arrested, the police also seized 46 million dollars worth of assets, including luxury supercars. The police added that they „found and destroyed 17 cheats,” but we have no idea what they meant. though it’s unclear exactly what this means.

According to the BBC, this was a massive criminal enterprise that earned money based on the lack of the players’ skills (otherwise, why would anyone pay for such cheats?), and as more and more games tend to get multiplayer added (potentially excluding Cyberpunk 2077, as CD Projekt RED is reconsidering its planned standalone multiplayer experience…), there is indeed a lot of potential to gain wealth based on a lack of skill.

The games are the easiest to be modified on PC, but there are already solutions to compete against Cheat Engine. On consoles, we recently mentioned that the not-so-liked Denuvo Anti-Tamper’s brother, Denuvo Anti-Cheat has become available on PlayStation 5 (and it wasn’t liked on PC when Bethesda temporarily added it to Doom: Eternal), with its owner touting it to be a success.

Source: PSL