Image Credit: scyther5/Shutterstock
The gaming industry has come a long way since I got my start in gaming with Diablo and Counter-Strike in the late ’90s. With the advent of virtual reality and the proliferation of virtual currencies, the gaming experience has evolved into something far greater in recent years.
We no longer just have games, we have entire worlds — and real economies inside of them.This is perhaps illustrated most famously by last summer’s World of Warcraft gold-stealing script incident. As gaming becomes more connected to the real world, so too do the consequences of bad actors looking to turn a quick profit. Just last week, hackers were back in the industry’s crosshairs with Microsoft’s move against Chinese hackers charged with stealing virtual currency.
As an industry, we have a lot of work to do if we want to keep the gaming experience and our respective community thriving. In particular, we must do more to prevent malicious hacking in modern gaming — and, importantly, we must find ways to do it without undermining the hacker culture that has existed at the very core of our community since the beginning. This hacker culture can offer significant benefits to the industry.
In the early days of gaming, hacking meant something far different than it does today. Long before the likes of Oculus and Vive, gamers’ eyes like mine were instead focused on the possibility of hacking games to beat whatever challenge was ahead — finding cheat codes, exploiting bugs, modding, and so forth.
When games went online, the urge to hack them in this fashion only intensified.Finding a bug in a game meant you could exploit it to beat your live opponents on the other side of the globe or steal digital objects and sell them for cash to other gamers on eBay or in underground forums. For proof, look no further than UnKnoWnCheaTs, a forum which surfaced back in the early days and has since grown to nearly two million members who swap game hacks and cheats.
For the gaming companies, this was great. The bigger and more engaged their community, the better. It was a sign of success. However, while internet-accelerated growth created amazing new opportunities for these companies, it also brought about new challenges they were not even remotely prepared for — chief among them, keeping their systems buttoned up while also keeping up with explosive demand.
In a nutshell, an increasingly competitive gaming market means that…
The post How the game industry can play well with hackers appeared first on FeedBox.