Piracy is a huge problem for game developers. Can you stop them? When hackers steal your games, you lose revenue. Or do you? Would any of these players have bought your game? How do you turn pirates in to paying players? Estimates are that between 80 and 90 percent of the copies of both PC [...click to continue...]
Cheaters. Everyone hates them. They anger your players. They cost you thousands of customer support hours. They distract your Live Team from helping other players, adding features, and fixing bugs… so why don’t you do something about them? There are solutions. And sometimes, they are free: Start thinking about cheating when you are designing the [...click to continue...]
Are You Ready To Protect Your Game Business?
Security is a bottom line issue. If it doesn’t make you money, save you money, and keep you out of the press (unless you want to be there), it serves no purpose. Pirates cost you sales. Cheaters drive away legitimate players. Gold farmers increase customer support costs.
Software used in at least 3 online casinos has been found to cheat badly. … or badly cheat. Players were cheated…. were the casinos victims as well? The casino games were reviewed by 2 well-known gambling statisticians, Michael Shackleford and Eliot Jacobson. Specifically, the cheating game was Craps developed by BLR Sofrware. The casinos were: Legends, licensed in Panama, 5Dimes, in [...click to continue...]
Valve and Turbine have joined Sony and a lot of others in having their online services breached. There is some question whether “encrypted passwords” were compromised. Personal information was likely compromised. Email was compromised. Passwords may be at risk. I’m really tired of writing about this. It is completely avoidable. It is totally, completely, easily [...click to continue...]
I am speaking in Washington DC at the Digital Gaming and Lottery Policy Summit on December 5 and 6. The conference is particularly timely as many US states and the Congress are considering legislation to legalize online poker and lotteries. I will be speaking on 2 panels: Cheating – Assessing and Addressing the Danger and Relevant Security [...click to continue...]
Game companies hate bots. Players hate bots. Except a lot of players use bots. Why? Because bots work. For MMOs, they eliminate the intentional tedium or “grind” that developers put in to keep players bored while they play but not so bored that they’ll quit. For online poker, they help you play better and make [...click to continue...]
What are the 2 types of cheating in online pokerthat are pretty much unstoppable? Data mining – using archived game hands to analyze and beat another player. Ghosting – playing using some else’s account. Data Mining in Online Poker A while back, a well-known online poker player was suspended for using data mining against another [...click to continue...]
Building a high performance web site is kind of a lie. You really want to build a cluster of high performance web sites for most online businesses. You may want to have a separate site for customer service, developer relations, partners, affiliates, and other groups. You may want to have a online community or membership [...click to continue...]
It all starts with your web site. If you are building a serious online business, you need a real web site. You may need several web sites. That means a virtual web server or dedicated server. A Bit of History When I started my business back in 2001, we actually owned our servers and co-located [...click to continue...]
Collusion. Cheating. If you have a game with more than 2 players, you’ve probably got a collusion problem. How do you stop it? Do you care? For a online poker site operator, collusion doesn’t really cost you money. After all, you get paid no matter the game outcome with your rake from the pot. This [...click to continue...]
Online poker has helped fuel the huge resurgence of poker. The dark side of this popularity is the growth in accusations of cheating – poker bots, deck “reading”, and rigged games raise concerns about the reliability of these online, and loosely regulated, gambling operations. By the way, these problems are applicable to any “player-vs-player” game [...click to continue...]
Sony got hacked again, or did they? From the descriptions, it would seem some hackers were attempting to brute force login to a bunch of accounts – 90,000 on the Playstation Network (PSN) and/or 30,000 on Sony Online (SOE). Sony stated the number of accounts were 0.1 percent of their users (alas, 0.1% of 100 [...click to continue...]
I've worked at the intersection of security and business for over 25 years of experience: led product launches, re-engineered business systems, programmed, developed web sites, filed patents, advised startups, and done some hardcore security work. For the past decade, I've focused on the game and gaming- helping traditional computer games, online games, social games, MMOs, promotions, skill games, and iGaming.
I wrote Protecting Games: A Handbook for Developers and Publishers. It is 400 pages of practical advice and solutions to help computer game and online game makers.
Click to keep up with the latest information to grow and protect your game business.
I've worked at the intersection of security and business for over 25 years of experience: led product launches, re-engineered business systems, programmed, developed web sites, filed patents, advised startups, and done some hardcore security work. For the past decade, I've focused on the game and gaming- helping traditional computer games, online games, social games, MMOs, promotions, skill games, and iGaming.
I wrote Protecting Games: A Handbook for Developers and Publishers. It is 400 pages of practical help for computer game and online game makers.
Get the latest on game security.
Click to keep up with the latest information to grow and protect your game business.