It ' s not going to be an infinite timeframe , it ' s going to get harder to cheat and harder to protect until it ' s no longer worth it to cheat or protect it . It ' s only fear that the hackers may win in the end which would cause you to want to avoid the fight . That is why I said it is never ending until your game dies . It ' s infinite catmouse until then , it always becomes too expensive to protect your game because making hacks is something that for actual hack makers only effectively costs time games are relatively cheap , hack developers often have people buy them copies of the game especially during sales , the scarier hack developers make quite a lot of profit relative to the cost of games etc , whereas for developers it costs time and money since they have to pay people for their time which easily out paces the amount hack developers ever actually spend on their cause by a multitude . Also it ' s not really avoiding the fight . it ' s making the fight far easier for developers and weakening the hackers platform of attack . But I don ' t think that will happen because pirates are slowly losing vs DRM , see Denuvo , the first DRM that is actually somewhat successful after 30 years of every DRM attempt being cracked within days of the game release . This is true , however the difference here is Denuvo still sometimes gets cracked , but as long as you can cover about a month or two then your DRM is successful since the first couple weeks is barring absurd sale when most sales of a product happen . Hack protection on the hand can ' t do the things Denuvo does but you need to try and protect more than just a month or two . Developing software is iterative . Let ' s say you are a developer , your last hack was detected , so you rebuy the game , make some changes and recompile , only you didn ' t change it enough and it gets detected immediately . There goes $ 40 . Again , hack developers basically never get detected . Hack developers the prolific ones that actually matter and aren ' t making janky cheats so you have to actually work to detect them anyways have fans who will give them extra accounts if necessary , but hack developers also won ' t be using their public hack on their own main account lol . To put this into perspective , out of all of Team Fortress 2 ' s main hack developers literally only 1 of them has a VAC ban and it isn ' t even in TF 2 . This scenario does not happen because basic safety avoids your account from being caught if you ' re a hack developer . Detecting via heuristics is neato , but generally the viewpoint is you don ' t ban someone unless you are 100 % sure and heuristics are anything but 100 % sure . False positives are reputation blows and companies would rather let someone they ' re not sure about through than potentially ban someone who might be cheating . It ' s why one of the safer ways to cheat is to to do it in relative plain sight using a custom module not seen before that trips VAC and their heuristics sends it to Valve , but they won ' t ban hammer it because it ' s a unique trip and could just be a weird edge case because computers are silly like that sometimes . Are they a new account that skipped the tutorial , went directly to the test area and pressed a bunch of buttons not bound to the game ? This is an awful idea because not only is it not possible to know without a keylogger which would require you to notify the user that this is happening due to it being illegal in U . S . law to install a keylogger without notification to the end user which would let ever hacker know it ' s happening , but it ' s possible to bypass by modifying your keyboard ' s driver to hide the inputs from whatever is monitoring the inputs , essentially keylogging innocent people with no real gain once figured out . Inputs only get monitored as the commands that get thrown ingame , you ' d have a massive shit storm if a game started monitoring all inputs while the game was open including in other windows . I mean , there was a gigantic shit storm that Valve had to PR against when they made VAC check your DNS cache for cheat site domains and banned people based on that , lol , keylogging inputs even if approved wouldn ' t fly very well . Street Fighter 5 got a massive shit storm for installing a rootkit to detect more cheating programs and had to remove it . Do they keep tabbing away from the game in windowed mode ? Plenty of normal people do this . I ' d wager most people do . If I ' m pubbing and not much is going on I ' ll tab away to change my spotify song lol . You aren ' t going to detect much of anything with this . Do they stop receiving inputs for time frames as they move around shooting to the side of bots ? I think you mean send here but stuff like silent aim still sends inputs it just sends different inputs than the ones you ' re actually doing . Usually stuff like that gets detected via the method it accomplishes this , e . g . since this is a game I ' ve actually worked with in this area clientside Silent Aim in Garry ' s Mod is relatively easy to detect because the most common method of accomplishing it is in C via CHLClientCreateMove and to check for that . Of course , client side silent aim is pretty useless in a game with adminned servers , but I digress . In a game like CounterStrike Global Offensive with a server based Silent Aim you could look for players dropping the angle change packet repeatedly via delaying it over a period of time where they also are shooting people . Blizzard doesn ' t even need to ban anybody for cheating either , they could just only match you with other cheaters . Being permanently stuck playing with cheaters without any ban wave may be even more devastating . Ya , Fairfight has the option for this . I ' m not sure if it proved to be statistically not a good idea or something because the only game to my knowledge that has used this feature is Titanfall 1 . Do you have any stats or articles to point to for this ? I ' m not sure if any anticheat has released stats on this but I doubt it because AntiCheat tends to keep as much to the chest as possible . I think you just have to understand the logic behind it , delayed ban waves slows hack progress because it isn ' t constantly invigorating hackers to constantly beat the system . By slowing hack progress , you ' re slowing them from working together or investing into the things that actually are undetectable . Once they hit that point you lose and there ' s not much you can do about it . Stuff like Denuvo can work because you just need to encrypt the executable hard enough that breaking through it takes longer than a couple days and ideally 30 to get through and only has to worry about people emulating the protection itself which has been accomplished semi recently , Doom being the most recent game pirated through this method , although Denuvo has already been updated and now people will have to reemulate the method on the next batch of games , when it comes to hacking you have to worry about avenues you can ' t really stop very easily like hacks embedded in ring 0 and plenty of different code bases each which can be encrypted or obfuscated in many different ways or many different ways to cheat . Most likely it will be solved by a 3 rd party company like Fairfight . Again , you can ' t solve it without trampling freedoms . Unless you have a clever idea for how companies are supposed to detect all of the following wallhacks written in tons of different code bases in tons of different ways with tons of different encryptionsobfuscations aimbots traditional , low and high fov , silent , trigger , etc written in tons of different code bases in tons of different ways with tons of different encryptionsobfuscations DirectX start menu renderer communicating with the games DirectX renderer written in tons of different code bases in tons of different ways with tons of different encryptionsobfuscations people modifying their keyboard andor mouse andor monitor andor graphics card my area of expertise personally andor CPU andor motherboard drivers and embedding the hacks in them written in tons of different code bases in tons of different ways with tons of different encryptionsobfuscations . ring 0 hacks Any game specific exploits ie in CSGO some people cheated at LAN by creating a Steam Workshop Map that had the hack embedded into the map itselfYou can ' t without thoroughly monitoring the hardware and spying on everyone playing the game which involves country laws etc you somehow have to get around if you want to actually eliminate hacking . You can make it a burden , you can heavily lessen it , but eliminating it 100 % of the way is an impossibility without some outlandish spying . . It ' s why , since we ' re also talking about Denuvo , even they say every protected game eventually gets cracked . They ' re just great at delaying it . It ' s the best you can do without monitoring everyone to watch them pirate stuff in real time . Video game hacking is also much more complex than video game piracy is to tackle too , between the much more complex subject , way more areas of attack , and the fact that piracy is statistically proven to at the bare minimum be curbed by just providing a better , easy to use , competing service with solid read cheap prices , whereas you could have the greatest cheapest game on the planet and people will still hack in it in spades . I or any of the other people I ' ve worked with are hardly running away from the fight though . There are tons of very smart passionate people who work on this , and it ' s one of those things where if you aren ' t a part of said fight you don ' t really understand how bad said fight actually is . IDK what you particularly do at your software company , but I wouldn ' t begin to presume how bad off some of the troubles you guys come across is , either . Essentially , saying you can solve hacking is on par with saying you can solve computer viruses or malware from existing .