Cheat subscriptions and premium hacks aren't anything particularly new when it comes to multiplayer games on the PC. However, there isn't much known about the business side of these sellers, it's not like they announce their earnings publicly or anything like that. However, it turns out that Bohemia Interactive has a good idea of how much DayZ cheat sellers are making- and it sure is a lot.
Speaking at the Game Developer Conference this week (via PCGamesN), DayZ developer, Eugen Harton, revealed a few interesting tidbits about cheat sellers in a presentation, like some cheats selling for as high as $500 though must are much cheaper.
Some of the bigger DayZ cheat sellers have made as much as $1.25 million per year so it is no small business. Obviously, Bohemia does go to some great lengths to find cheats and figure out who the sellers are. At one point, staff behind DayZ had interviews over Skype with cheat sellers in Russia or China while pretending to be customers in an attempt to dig up more dirt.
While public cheat sites are easier to shut down as they are easier to access, there is a certain amount of private sites floating around that make it fairly hard to gain access in hopes that the exploits will remain unnoticed.
KitGuru Says: That's a lot of money to make doing something that actively makes the game worse. That said, I haven't played DayZ in quite some time so I'm not sure what the cheating situation is like these days. Do any of you play DayZ still? Do you regularly run into cheaters?
Stopped playing DayZ about 18 months ago, the game was so buggy and unfinished (i know it was in alpha) that i got sick of it, running for 20 miles (like a freaking hour) just to die from a single zombie scratch, because that zombie walked through a closed door through the floor and hit me once.
Shame because i loved playing the mod and thought that the standalone would be a good step up, but no, runs like ass. Have encountered more than my fair share of cheaters in the mod, not so much in the standalone, in the mod, i also had my OA key stolen and used to cheat by someone else which got my game banned.
Meh, not sure if im even interested in that game anymore.
Interestingly enough, a friend of mine was also banned from Arma 2 after having his key stolen and used by a cheater. It actually seems to be a fairly common problem but as far as I know Bohemia is unwilling to do anything about it or help those affected.
Same happened to me, Sucks because I want to go back and play the mod but I can not and it blows, and Yeah I haven’t played dayZ standalone since the day I first bought it when it came out, Reason why well it still runs like shit to this day and its sad, They say they are going to be fixing it here soon but I don’t see it working and giving me playable Fps of 60.
On top of this though I don’t like where the games going with the crafting system, Back when they added Ghille suits I walked around the map 5 times spending more then 10 hours just trying to craft the suit, I will never spend the amount of time on it again, I don’t like the idea of chopping trees down, finding the little propane cans to cook food or anything else,
I hate that they are focused on that, WATCH the zombies when ever the hell they add them in will be easy and it will be just about killing other players, They wont make the zombies hard as balls to make the game a challenge.
but it was from gamespy time i think, now you need to active your key on steam, it cant be stolen so easy.
The standalone was great and it was launched, yes buggy, lag and other bunch of shit, but we as a clan had lots of fun, gearing up, hunting down players, and made the best of it. Then came the update where the NEAB got replaced by a civilian airport, and that sucked big time. Just because whiners couldn’t handle being killed when entering he premises…. Whatever, seemed that after that the game wasn’t as fun to play anymore, and the bugs got worst and worst, no progression on the engine, zombies got even more buggier than before, hackers all over the freaking map…. It’s now been 8 months I ve been dayz free and it doesn’t look like we re going to play that game back anything soon. Sad