[raptorfactor]

> They might sell their software or distribute it to people that do play to cheat, but the cheat designers are rarely motivated by a desire to be at the top of a leaderboard that will boot them off for obvious manipulation. So the entire concept of blaming the players for wanting to win so bad is really just an emotional "we're the poor developers" deflection.

Are you sure you're not deflecting the issue onto a group of people that doesn't really exist either? I.e. The group of people who are just "hacking to hack" - these people do exist but they are exceptionally rare (w.r.t the likelihood of running into a player using that persons cheat) compared to the ones who are in it for some personal gain, financial or otherwise. Also this group is typically not the one having an oversized negative impact on the game (as always there are exceptional cases - but it's not the norm).

The cheat designers are motivated by money, and their customers are motivated by a desire to be at the top of a leader-board (or to grief, or because they feel "everyone else is doing it so I have to", etc). I'm not sure it makes sense to throw out the entire argument just because a level of indirection is there. If the customers stopped caring about winning at any cost, it follows that most of the cheat developers would have no more motivation to maintain the cheats (at least as publicly available to the masses), because the money would dry up and the work would not be worth it anymore.

RMT is also huge in certain games. For example Escape from Tarkov is infested with cheaters not because they want to get on the leaderboards, but because they want to sell items/services to other players for real money (cheating by proxy basically), and again those players spending real money are doing it to gain an advantage in-game.

It's also important to note that that maintaining a public cheat is _very_ different to maintaining a private one. Basically nobody who is just 'hacking to hack' is going to be publicly maintaining a cheat for a major competitive online game just for the heck of it. Privately for sure, that happens all the time where things are traded/sold between just a handful of people. But nobody is out there maintaining free public cheats for Valorant, Apex, Siege, etc. (or at least not one that puts a meaningful effort into evading anti-cheat, which is sort of the point).

Sometimes the two groups overlap (i.e. an individual might "hack to hack" in their spare time, whilst also contracting for a commercial cheat developer), but if the commercial incentive disappears, so does the most of the negative impact on the game even if that individual continues to cheat personally (because 1 is less than tens of thousands - and the people who were previously buying cheats don't have the skills to replicate it themselves).

[therein]

I did develop my own custom kernel level cheat for Rust before. Completely undetected for over 8-9 months. A couple of my friends also used it. It was fun but we did get bored of it eventually and didn't get a ban except for once or twice during initial development because I did indeed step on the toes of the anti-cheat and had it not been for the kernel level anti-cheat, it would be so much simpler for me to develop this whole thing. Eventually, Windows kernel updated, I had to update some offsets for DKOM and I lost interest eventually.

There is a lot of money to be made in this industry. There are many people that would pay 5-7$ per day for undetected hacks like this.