Using Money As Incentive For Competition On Consoles? 40
MTV's Multiplayer blog reports on a company about to start offering a service that will allow players to compete in matches and tournaments over their PS2, PS3, or Xbox 360 with real money as a prize. Doing so will, of course, require entry fees, but the contests are set up and opted into by the players themselves. Quoting:
"To prevent cheating, the company has access to the game data and promises a knowledgeable in-house customer support team. There's also a reputation and feedback system, which Levy compared to eBay, that will allow gamers to make informed decisions about who they're playing against. ... [Company co-founder Billy Levy] ultimately thinks World Gaming will open up the field for gamers who want to make money from games but can't make it to live competitions due to the expense or having to take time off from work or school.
Three words: (Score:3, Informative)
Trusted client problem.
Imagine the creativity that will be applied to hacking consoles with actual money - any actual money whatsoever - as an incentive. You thought bot runners were bad on PC games? Look at online poker.
Re:I can't see them stopping cheating. (Score:3, Informative)
Although that was several years ago and the game and anti-cheat programs have been updated many many times, the majority of my old cheats will still work while some of them would need a simple adjustment of two lines of code to make them work again. That's because I didn't even bother breaking any anti-cheat. I simply caught hashes of the textures used on other players on OpenGL and D3D level, determined where on the screen they were, and was able to make aimbots that even compensated my ping and worked with non-direct hit weapons like rocket launchers by anticipating the movement of other players. I submitted them to two anti-cheat teams but unlike catching the particular cheats I submitted by looking up it's memory signature, which could even be circumvented by a simple byte-hack, there was nothing they could do.
One of my cheats, for Unreal Tournament 1, somehow got leaked by the AC team to a private cheater forum and is probably in use until today. When I still played the game some years ago, I set up a server with a custom map made by me, where I used the player textures that the cheat identifies on some pillars in the map. During the two weeks the server was running, I saw at least four people that seemed to have a great aim but somehow often shooted at the pillars too.
Those cheats can even be done on a driver level, making it almost impossible to catch by anti-cheat methods, unless all API developers, graphics card manufactors, driver coders and Microsoft would work together on it without screwing it up at any of the many possible points that could create a hole. Won't happen anytime soon, I guess.
You might want to say that TFA is about consoles, but modern consoles are just computers, too. There is barely a difference.
They should keep money out of gaming for every game that doesn't completely run server-side and requires to trust the client at some point, which includes pretty much any realtime 3D game. Any major pro gaming league and other competitions always perform the finals, where serious money is involved, at a LAN and get very suspicious if people suddenly don't play as good as they did online before for that reason.
Hell, with enough money involved, even I might get interested in the dark side again. Playing games while earning money and without any serious risk? Better than trusting a bank to invest it these days.