alt Hacker NewsThe arms race honestly was so foolish. The era being discussed especially being pre achievements, pre internet in a lot of ways as we know it. So what if someone cheats in a ps2 game. Doesn’t hurt anyone.
And then you have to figure the devs realize you can do this and reverse engineer the entire game anyhow. Why even obfuscate it is the real question. Makes their workflow a little more awkward potentially and doesn’t do the intended thing.
I blame the nontechnical C suite. They don’t understand what I just wrote. So to them, this instead makes perfect sense. Lock it down, never mind why or if the lock works, just lock it and tell me its done. Command comes from upon high and so marches the industry and the hackers after them.
Back in the early days of video games, it was rare for people to actually beat one. The difficulty was inflated to create long term interest. You didn't just play things from start to finish and watch cinematics while pressing a button occasionally. Playing a game was about mastering it.
So, to game developers in the less-early-but-still-early days, letting people cheat their way through even a single player game was a danger in that it took away the prestige of actually succeeding by normal means. It was a shameful thing to do despite the triviality. To them, getting a high score or completing a game was serious business, and cheating deserved countermeasures. Nowadays people openly cheat in competitive games where it DOES impact other people, with no remorse. I would prefer the extreme where all cheating is treated like crime over the opposite where people are proud of their ability to install an aimbot.