Cheating in online games isn’t a fringe annoyance anymore — it’s a business, and a bigger one than most of the industry it preys on. A new report from anti-cheat firm Anybrain, published September 15, puts the global cheating economy at $8.5 billion a year, a figure Activision has now folded into its own public messaging about Call of Duty’s fight against cheat sellers.

Where the $8.5 billion comes from

Anybrain’s report, The Rise of Cheating as a Service, breaks the total into two buckets: roughly $3.5 billion from cheat software subscriptions themselves, and about $5 billion from adjacent services like hardware ID spoofers and paid account boosting. For scale, that combined figure is larger than Twitch’s reported $1.8 billion in 2024 revenue, and it exceeds projected global esports revenue of $5.1 billion for 2026, betting included.

The report is built on a survey of 250 multiplayer game developers across the US and UK, paired with pricing analysis across cheat marketplaces. First-person shooters and battle royale titles account for 61% of cheat subscription spending, with mobile games at 24% and MMOs at 14% — the smallest slice today, but the segment Anybrain flags as growing fastest.

Developers are losing more than just fairness

The survey data is where the report gets uncomfortable for publishers. 51% of the studios surveyed reported a measurable decline in player retention or revenue directly tied to cheating, and 69% called it a serious or very serious problem for their games. That’s despite widespread investment in countermeasures: 76% of studios said they’ve deployed at least one anti-cheat system, and 93% have a dedicated team working on the problem.

Even so, the arms race isn’t going well. 45% of developers said cheaters routinely evade their anti-cheat tools anyway, 58% face regular community complaints about cheating specifically, and 31% reported false positives — legitimate players getting banned by mistake. Looking ahead, 88% of studios said they plan to increase anti-cheat spending over the next year, and a striking 92% still believe cheating can eventually be brought under control, despite the numbers suggesting otherwise so far.

Activision’s enforcement numbers, by contrast

Activision has leaned into the RICOCHET Anti-Cheat figures it’s been building out all year for Call of Duty. The company says it has disrupted more than 375 cheat-reselling operations, delivered at least 80 cease-and-desist notices, and shut down over 30 cheat providers outright — including filming a lawyer personally serving a cease-and-desist notice to a cheat seller’s home earlier this summer. David Andrews, Activision’s Senior Director of Game Security for Call of Duty, has described RICOCHET as operating at the kernel level of a player’s operating system, giving it visibility other anti-cheat software lacks.

That enforcement push isn’t happening in a vacuum. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is approaching, and Activision has confirmed its PC beta will require TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot to even launch — hardware-level security gates aimed squarely at the kind of kernel-level cheats the RICOCHET team has been chasing. Framing cheating as an $8.5 billion problem, rather than a scattered nuisance, gives Activision a cleaner justification for asking PC players to clear a higher security bar before they can even open the beta.

The bigger picture

What the Anybrain numbers really illustrate is a mismatch: publishers are spending more on detection and enforcement than ever, and still watching over half their peers report real revenue damage. Activision’s specific tally of disrupted operations and shuttered vendors is a genuine dent, but it’s a dent in an $8.5 billion market that Anybrain’s own developers don’t expect to shrink on its own — hence the plan to keep increasing anti-cheat budgets rather than declare victory.

For more on how Call of Duty’s competitive standing looks lately, see our coverage of Black Ops 2 outranking Black Ops 7 on PS5. And for the wider financial backdrop this kind of report fits into, read about the industry’s record profits alongside record layoffs in 2026.