Another game security entry

I posted about the issue of cheating at on-line games earlier this year and the CEO of SecurePlay Software for Game Developers (Flash/ Java) with Cheating Protection e-mailed me chime in about his product. Wow, this blog thing actually works!

The SecurePlay approach is much harder to get to market though. It is an SDK that game developers need to buy and integrate into development. The PunkBuster approach is much easier to sell (and buy) because they write agents per game. If you are playing a certain game, get the punkbuster for that game and you have something that monitors for all the common cheats. I have got to believe that a client software that knows more about the specific game you are playing would be better at detecting cheats. Also, as a player, I may want something that I buy on my side that is doing the checking. Just because a game developer tells me his game is safe, do I believe him?

There are alot of ways to cheat. Not all of them detectable by a computer. For example, player collusion against the house. How does the house know that two players have an IM session open and are sharing information? Or are on the phone together? SecurePlay does have a helpful guide to many of the traditional ways to cheat a game in the physical world and their translation to the computer world.