XenoScifi said:
This is a great move to help curb online cheating. I agree with everything this lawsuit is aiming at all the way down to these cheats down right making a game look bad and in turn a potential loss of sales.
I hope this will pick up steam and other publishers start taking action.
Cheaters actually increase sales, they don't decrease it.
Cheaters cheat because they get a kick out of it, and since they run the risk of getting banned, they often purchase multiple accounts (I've heard of cheaters who have upwards 20 paid accounts just for one game), or maybe they just have one account that they just repurchase if they getbanned. So in fact cheaters are actually paying the most to the company on a per-customer basis.
This, btw, is also one of the reasons that companies does 'Ban waves' (banning a lot of cheaters at the same time, rather than banning cheaters the instant they detect them). Instant and frequent bans reduces the chance that cheaters will repurchase accounts, but occasional bans keeps them around. Ban waves are also good for marketing, since the game company can boast that it does something about cheaters, when in reality they are holding back.
The 'lost sales' argument is also a rather weak argument, although I'm sure it's still an easy sell in court. Unless the game is subscription based, like an MMO, people have already purchased the game, and since games sell most of their copies in the initial time of existence, your game will really need to have accrued a very bad reputation as a 'cheaters paradise'. And even then, most people who still buy it will still be unaware of that until they experience it first-hand. There is also little to no evidence that cheaters is a strong reason that people stop playing a certain game.
If this picks up, then cheaters will simply modify their tactics, and start releasing cheats from countries where they can't be prosecuted. You can make a lot of money with cheats (some people have made millions of dollars), so there isn't exactly a lack of motivation for relocating yourself if necessary.
So in short, this solves nothing, neither in the short or the long run, regarding cheaters. It does, however, have the potential to set a scary precedence regarding software modification (including mods that aren't cheating-related). So i sure as hell doesn't hope that this picks up... or at least i don't hope it's gonna have consequences for software modification outside of cheating.
