I’m a solo dev building an anti-cheat SDK aimed at indie/small teams, the kind of thing you can drop into a Windows build in an afternoon instead of integrating a giant platform. It catches the common stuff (memory edits, injected DLLs, hooks, debuggers, tampered save files), no kernel driver.
Before I go further I want a reality check from people actually shipping games:
• Is cheating even a problem for your game, or is it a non-issue at your scale?
• If you’ve looked at anti-cheat before: What stopped you? Price? Complexity? Felt like overkill?
• Would you rather just roll your own server-side checks?
Genuinely after honest answers, including “nobody at our size cares about this.” Happy to share what I’ve built if useful, but mostly I want to know if I’m solving a real problem or a made-up one.
Building a lightweight anti-cheat for small games does anyone here actually need this?
I'm focused on single player 4X so at this time, the player cheating is not really a problem. I'm far more concerned with writing an AI that doesn't cheat, lol. I do have an interest in social aspects of single player games, such as having tournaments where people start from the same conditions and see who finishes fastest. Then cheating might be of more interest. Can't worry about that until the core experience is solid though.
I suppose that any game that offers externally viewable Achievements, could concern itself about cheating. When I was recently on target to achieve certain difficult things in Emperor of the Fading Suns, some players in that community asked questions about the possibility of me cheating. My complete ignorance of the tactics they hinted at, seemed to convince them that I wasn't planning to cheat my way to these things. Also, my long-winded propensity to report on the actual content of my games. It's a small community though, like you can probably only remember 20 actively recurring posters on Discord. I wonder how much a larger community cares about single player cheating with achievements, like say for Hearts of Iron IV?
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