Activision Says Cheating Is an $8.5 Billion Industry, but the Number Comes From a Third-Party Estimate
By CriticalPixel ·
Activision wants you to know that cheating is big business, and it has a very large number to prove it. In a blog post dated September 18, the Call of Duty publisher's Team Ricochet says the broader cheating economy generates about $8.5 billion a year, with roughly $3.5 billion of that coming from cheat subscriptions across just 15 games. Eurogamer picked the story up today, and the headline reads like Activision measured the market itself. It did not, and that detail matters more than the number. Here is what the post says, where the figure comes from, and why the timing, a little over a month before Modern Warfare 4, deserves a raised eyebrow.
What Activision Actually Said
Activision's Ricochet blog post reads like a state of the union for the anti-cheat program covering Modern Warfare 4 and Black Ops 7. The team says it has disrupted more than 375 reseller operations, issued more than 80 cease-and-desist demands, and helped shut down 31 primary cheat vendors. It also says it issued more than 70,000 new hardware bans last month. On the money side, Activision puts a typical cheat subscription at around $40 a month, up to $100 or more at the high end, with spoofing tools adding another recurring fee, so one determined cheater can burn through more than $1,000 a year. The pitch is that cheating is a losing investment because every ban torches whatever the player paid for. That is a claim made by the side that sells the game, in a post that also promotes its own anti-cheat.
The $8.5 Billion Number Is Not Activision's
Here is the catch. The blog itself says the figures come from a February analysis by the threat intelligence platform Intorqa, which estimated that cheat subscriptions across 15 games generate roughly $3.5 billion annually and forecast the broader economy, once account sales, boosting and spoofing are counted, at about $8.5 billion. Eurogamer's headline says Activision claims the number, which is true in the sense that Activision is repeating it, but it is not Activision's own audit. Intorqa's write-up is upfront that it is a model rather than a measurement. Its authors argue that a final irrefutable figure is unrealistic, and they deliberately avoid pricing the whole industry across every game and region. The analysis leans on proxies such as ban volumes, since cheat vendors do not publish customer numbers, and it cites older data points like Tencent's 2020 estimate of $293 million for the Chinese cheat business alone. So the honest way to read it is as a big, defensible ballpark, not a number anyone can audit.
Inside the Cheat Business
Activision breaks the market into three pillars: cheats, accounts and evasion. Cheats are the aimbots, wallhacks and DMA hardware everyone knows about, plus controller gadgets like Cronus, XIM and Titan. Accounts are the stolen, aged and ranked-ready profiles cheaters need after a ban, backed by boosting services. Evasion is the spoofer layer that helps banned players slip back in. The team also calls out what it labels false variety, where many different brands turn out to be the same reskinned product, which helps detected cheats survive longer and muddies community discussion of bans. My favorite detail is the sellers who blamed months of downtime on the flu, surgery or a car accident when their product had simply been detected.
There is a darker side that the cheat-buying crowd should read twice. Activision says sellers collect IP addresses, linked Discord accounts, hardware information, email addresses and payment details from customers, and some vendors demand photo identification during onboarding. Cheat developers also embed malware in their products, according to the post. Customers are being asked to disable their security protections and hand personal data to anonymous sellers who, by Activision's account, sometimes run exit scams and then rebrand. Even if you think Activision is exaggerating for effect, that is a rough trade for a temporary aim boost.
Ricochet Gets Tougher Ahead of Modern Warfare 4
The timing is not subtle. Modern Warfare 4 lands October 23 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Switch 2, and Activision is pushing pre-orders with $5 in store credit. The blog lists the stack Ricochet leans on: TPM 2.0 enforcement, Secure Boot, Remote Attestation, Microsoft Azure Attestation, and two-factor authentication requirements meant to choke off the supply of disposable accounts. It also cites a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report in which one in three surveyed gamers said their account had been hacked within the previous two years. Last month Activision posted footage of one of its lawyers delivering a cease-and-desist order to the Ohio home of a notorious Call of Duty cheat seller. Legal theater aside, the message to PC players is that hardware-backed checks are staying.
What Players Are Saying
Reaction is limited so far. Eurogamer, IGN and a handful of aggregator accounts have posted the headline, but very few ordinary players had weighed in when I looked, not enough to call a consensus. The one player reply that surfaced was a sarcastic jab at Activision acting shocked about cheating every season. It is a single tweet, so treat it as color, not a verdict. Until Modern Warfare 4 ships and lobbies actually feel cleaner, expect the loudest reactions to come from Call of Duty players who have heard anti-cheat promises before.
The CriticalPixel Take
Cheating is a genuine problem, and shutting down 31 primary vendors while hitting 375 resellers is a serious body of work if the numbers hold up. But an $8.5 billion headline built on a third party's forecast, delivered in a post that doubles as a pre-launch security pitch, deserves more skepticism than most outlets gave it. Activision is telling PC players that TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and attestation are the price of a fair lobby, and requirements like that carry a meaningful cost for anyone on an older machine. Nobody outside the company can verify the 70,000 hardware bans or the vendor takedown count, and the post offers no data on whether cheating in matches actually dropped. Show me cheater reports per match falling after launch and I will believe the losing-investment line. Until then it is a well-written press release with a scary number attached.
Bottom line: Ricochet is swinging harder, and the legal pressure on resellers looks like the most promising part of it. The market-size number is a marketing prop, and the real test lands on October 23. If Modern Warfare 4 launches with cleaner lobbies, Activision earns the victory lap. If it does not, the flu-and-surgery excuses will not be limited to cheat sellers.
Sources
Eurogamer: Activision says video game cheating is a $8.5 billion a year industry
Intorqa: Cheatonomics, how the video game cheat business became a multi-billion dollar industry