New Report Estimates 30K-174K Players Cheat in Video Games in North America and Europe Alone
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Key points
- A newly published report revealed that an estimated 30,000-174,000 players cheat in NA and the EU alone.
- This doesn’t take into account cheaters in other continents, such as Asia and South America.
- Researchers estimate that the video game cheating market earns around $100 million annually.
A new report by Wired revealed that there could be as many as 174,000 players who cheat in video games in North America and Europe alone. This estimate was determined after researchers analyzed cheat-selling websites in the aforementioned continents.
Not just that, but the same researchers found out that the combined revenue of 80 cheat websites they were observing was estimated to be between $12.8 million and $73.2 million annually. This means that they have been earning $1.1 million at a minimum per month.
This does not take into account cheat-selling websites outside the region, such as in Asia. In 2022, Wired published a report taking a deeper look at how much the video game cheating market earns, and the outlet estimated the market to be at around $100 million.
According to Tom Chothia, a cybersecurity professor who was interviewed by Wired, selling cheats can lead to that person earning a lot of money, but this also affects the game they are selling cheats for. Players tend to avoid games that have a lot of cheaters due to them being unenjoyable.
This has led to different developers developing their anti-cheat software and divisions that only work in preventing cheaters from accessing the game. In April 2025, EA reported that its kernel-level anti-cheat software, the EA Javelin Anticheat, has blocked over 33 million attempts to cheat across 2.2 billion PC gaming sessions since it was launched.
Popular games such as Valorant and Apex Legends have kernel-level anti-cheat, as recent cheating software has been working at the deepest level of the operating system, which is the kernel. Recently, PUBG: Battlegrounds announced that it will be implementing one in the future.
