Activision says cheating is an $8.5 billion business - and the cheaters pay more than you do for the game

Forty dollars a month. That's what Activision says an average cheat subscription costs, and the premium ones go past a hundred. Put it in euros and think about it for a second: someone in our region paying that is spending more on cheating every two months than the full-price game cost them in the first place. And the heavy users, according to the same breakdown, spend over a thousand dollars a year once you add spoofers and replacement accounts. That's a decent second-hand PS5 with games, every single year, just to aimbot strangers in Warzone.

The headline number Activision's Team Ricochet published is $8.5 billion a year for the whole cheating economy - subscriptions, account sales, boosting, spoofing. Cheat subscriptions across 15 games alone supposedly bring in around $3.5 billion. The team also lists its own scorecard: 31 primary vendors shut down, over 375 reseller operations disrupted, more than 80 cease-and-desist demands.

Take the number with a grain of salt

I'd be careful with the $8.5 billion. It's Activision's own estimate, published by Activision, and there's no independent audit attached. A publisher that's about to sell a new Call of Duty has every reason to frame cheating as an industrial-scale enemy rather than a problem with its own game. The figure may well be roughly right - the cheat business is obviously enormous - but treat it the way you'd treat a piracy loss estimate from a film studio: directionally true, precisely unknowable.

What I don't doubt is the per-player math, because that's the part you can verify yourself in any Discord reseller channel. And it explains something a lot of people here complain about: why banning doesn't work. If a replacement account is just another line item in a cheater's monthly budget, a ban is a cost of doing business, not a punishment. That's exactly why Ricochet keeps leaning on hardware-level stuff - TPM 2.0 enforcement, hardware fingerprinting, going after the sellers instead of the buyers.

What it means for the rest of us

The uncomfortable part for players in our region is that hardware-level anti-cheat doesn't distinguish between a cheater and someone running an older PC. TPM 2.0 requirements are fine if you bought a machine in the last few years; they're a wall if you're still on the rig you assembled around a second-hand GPU because that was what the budget allowed. The cheater with a thousand-dollar annual habit will buy a spoofer. The guy with a 2018 motherboard just doesn't get to play.

So yes, I'm glad someone is going after the vendors rather than only the accounts - that's the only part of this that actually shrinks the market. But every time a publisher reminds us how rich the cheating industry is, the next sentence is usually about what we'll have to install, enable or upgrade. Keep an eye on that sentence. It's the one that costs you money.

Image: Humphrey Muleba / CC CC0 1.0, source: https://stocksnap.io/photo/video-game-UXVE8KR1TN