Tencent Report Finds Game Cheat Businesses Shifting to Service Model
The white paper documents a structural shift in game cheating from selling software to providing results-as-a-service, and warns that DMA hardware and generative AI are making detection harder.
Reporting from 1 sources: 4Gamer.net.
Tencent's ACE security division published its 2025 Game Security White Paper, reporting that China's game market revenue hit 350.789 billion yuan and users exceeded 683 million. The paper estimates illegal game businesses at about 200 billion yen, with cheat tools and boosting services evolving into a Cheating as a Service model. DMA hardware cheats and AI-assisted bots are rising, with PC cheat samples up 124.4% year-on-year.
Tencent's game security division ACE released its 2025 Game Security White Paper on Wednesday, detailing how illegal businesses tied to game economies have grown and changed form. The paper estimates the scale of China's game-related illegal business at roughly 200 billion yen, covering cheat tools, fraudulent accounts, boosting services, and automated bot farming. It identifies a shift from selling cheat software to a model it calls Cheating as a Service, where providers log into accounts from dedicated environments and perform rank boosting or currency farming on behalf of users. The report also flags DMA hardware cheats, which read game memory from separate devices and leave few software traces, as a growing threat that moves the anti-cheat fight into hardware territory. PC cheat samples reached 138,395 in 2025, a 124.4% increase from 2024, with shooters accounting for 81.9% of all cheats. Mobile cheat functions rose 117.3% year-on-year. The paper notes that generative AI has lowered the barrier for cheat development and is also used to make bots behave more like human players, complicating detection.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.