Threat intelligence firm Intorqa reported in its 2026 Cheatonomics study that the global video game cheating economy generates an estimated $8.5 billion annually.
That’s more than the $7.53 billion that Electronic Arts generated in its fiscal year ended March 31, 2026. And so it goes without saying that EA’s crew of anti-cheat professionals has its hands full dealing with those who are generating cheat programs for games.
Mike Reavey and his team of cybersecurity professionals at EA are responsible for fighting the forces of cheating.
In September, EA noted in its year of progress report that EA Javelin now protects 21 games, with 10.8 billion PC gaming sessions monitored. EA said it dealt with 26.7 million cheat attempts in the preceding year, and it has about 99%-plus cheat detection accuracy and less than 1% error rates. Game launches are 60% faster.
And more than 4.8 million players enabled Secure Boot so far. For Battlefield 6 alone, more than 330,000 cheating attempts or anti-cheat tampering were blocked during the open beta test period.
More than 2.39 million cheat attempts were blocked shortly after launch, and EA estimated a match infection rate (MIR) of 2%, meaning 98% of matches were cheat-free. EA said 96.3% of more than 190 detected cheat programs had been disrupted or rendered ineffective, and 98.5% of PC players met Secure Boot compliance requirements.
I spoke with Reavey about the state of cheating in multiplayer games and the efforts to stop it. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Tell me about your approach to security for games and anti-cheat.
Mike Reavey: Security is a game that never ends. While there’s a bunch of things we could talk about, I think near to the heart here is the anti-cheat update. We did a progress report recently talking about the EA anti-cheat solution, which we call EA Javelin. You may be familiar with it. We created it. I consider myself lucky every day to be part of a team that cares so much about this stuff. We birthed this product years ago. It shipped first with a version of FIFA. Now it supports 21 titles across EA. It’s home-grown. We have a bunch of experts that spent a lot of time making sure the tech is solid.
But if you look at the transparency report, we think it shows that there’s a lot more that comes into play when trying to keep games fair for our players, besides just amazing, industry-leading tech, which we like to think Javelin is. We also try to attack the ecosystem of cheating. That’s grown up to no longer be just codes you can put in a single-player game. It’s a whole shadow industry with real business behind it. We try to disrupt that business by understanding how it works and let our players know what we’re doing on their behalf. It’s a cat and mouse game, so it’s never going to be perfect.
GamesBeat: How do you think about the industry behind it? Intorqa put out a report saying that cheating is an $8.5 billion industry. In some ways that’s astounding. Do you believe that number? Do you have your own statistics you’ve been able to calculate?
Reavey: It feels like a real industry. It feels like the numbers could be big. When we try to hold back the cheat development scene, it’s not trivial. I can’t say that I have a number on the economics that I can put behind it personally. That’s not where we’ve spent most of our effort. But we do follow the cheat distribution scene. We think it’s as important to have the best tech as it is to know how they reach their customers, how they support their customers. If we’re smart, we’ll make their actual business harder. And it really is a business. Whether that number is right or wrong, it’s a business. People are living off of cheats. They’re living off the disruption they cause our players. They’re not going to give up easily.
GamesBeat: You can see a lot of complaints on the subject on social media, but do you feel like there’s a lot of truth behind that? Or does that feel like exaggeration? For example, I’ve seen lots of people complaining about cheating in ARC Raiders. I know they have an anti-cheat solution. Can it be as bad as it seems on social media, when people say they can’t play a game anymore because it’s full of cheaters?
Reavey: I can’t speak for ARC Raiders, but I can say that when we look at the impact cheating has on players in our games, it’s a very real impact. We can measure retention rates. People that hit cheats, when we can verify that’s happening, they drop off our games. In some regions it’s the number one reason why players will quit a game. So I can say that–I think we would care regardless, because we’re a team of fans that love our games. But when we actually look at–you put all this energy into creating an entertainment experience, and then this group of people comes in to ruin it. It doesn’t just feel bad. It measures bad, and in a very real way.
We’ve seen some titles in the industry where the voice got so loud–it affects some titles more than others. A lot of shooters, it becomes a very real reason people give up on a game, if cheating is rampant in a shooter. We protect sports games as well. There’s an “it depends” behind that, but as a consequence it’s no joke. It’s a serious way to impact the ability to play fair.
GamesBeat: What has turned out to be the solution, in a broad sense? How have you been able to come up with something that stops cheaters?
Reavey: A few things. One is a mentality. This isn’t a thing you go and solve. Like I said, there’s an industry behind this. People are living off selling cheats. They won’t give up easily. You have to be in it for the long term. You build a platform and you build an approach with that in mind. You’re not trying to ship one thing and then be done. That helps you build a good team, have robust practices, have strong engineering, and have good partnerships with teams inside the company. You know that this is going to be part of games forever.
There are three things that come along when I talk about Javelin, the product. One is you need really strong tech. We’re lucky to have people that are very talented. They’re also deep gamers. They understand how people cheat, how cheats work at a very fundamental level. They build Javelin into the game in a way that makes it hard for you to modify the game process with cheat software without us catching you. We won’t keep everything out 100% of the time, but we’ll make it as hard as possible.
After that there are two things that aren’t really about the engineering. One is understanding how cheats are used, who sells them, when they sell them. If we know a cheat is very popular on the market and we can release a block for it right after it’s been distributed, it’s more painful for the cheat developer’s customers, because they just all went out and got it and it breaks on day one. That’s better than doing it too early and then letting the cheat developer react. We actually do strategize about how to disrupt the business, the way that cheat developers and distributors sell to their customers. It’s important for us to understand the situation around a cheat.
We also work with other partners. We were able to get one of the popular cheats that works outside of the game itself removed, all the scripts they were using, by reaching out to them about using our brand in ways that aren’t allowed. There are non-technical approaches like that. And then the last bit, honestly, is just talking about it. Letting people know that if they have a bad experience, there’s a team that comes with that game that cares as much as you would hope they would care to try to keep the game fair. They’re working all the time trying to make it fair. If you do have a bad experience, we hope you don’t have another one.
GamesBeat: How much do you think this trade in cheating programs intersects with hacking in general, attacks and malicious behavior toward companies? If they want to have their cheats be more successful, it seems like they could attack a company, get inside, and do harm, or perhaps find more about the best ways to cheat. How much does that happen, where you have to not only deal with cheating in a game, but also protect against outright attackers?
Reavey: There’s a lot of reasons why the anti-cheat team at EA is part of the overall cybersecurity team at EA, and that’s one of them. Overall, my remit is many things, but it’s to keep the bad guys out of EA, keep the games safe and fair for our players. We do see there’s overlap, both in attack potential and talent. The same people that can defend come from both sides of that house, and the same people that attack come from both sides of that house. They do go hand in hand.
Also, the team that develops anti-cheat grew out of the same individuals that were reviewing the game code before it released to our players, to make sure the game code was as secure as possible. Making sure the game itself didn’t have security issues. We now have that as part of our process. Not only do we produce Javelin, but as games are getting ready for release, we look at them and say, “Can this be attacked? Or can this be abused for cheating?” We try to defend against both of those things before the game is released. It’s all the same team.
GamesBeat: I remember someone at one company I used to talk to, who at some point got the offer of, “Either you’re going to jail, or you’ll come to work for us and help us.” He chose to help them, of course.
Reavey: Any time we can bring talent over to the bright side, we’re happy to do it. I will say that some of our staff were folks that–they care a lot about games. They were fans. They also knew how to cheat games, and they wanted to become part of the solution, so they joined our team.
GamesBeat: Are there cases where cheating in a game isn’t necessarily doing harm? You used to see easter eggs in games like SimCity that allowed you to embezzle money.
Reavey: There’s a bright line there personally. If it’s a single-player experience and you’re not ruining it for someone else, that’s different. It’s where you’re ruining the experience for others, people who have invested their time and energy into the game–when you feel that frustration, when you feel like something isn’t fair. We’re able to do anti-cheat defenses in a way that’s compatible with modding games. If you look at some of our recent Plants vs. Zombies stuff, players can still do stuff that doesn’t hurt anyone, but we’re stopping cheating that makes the game unfair. We try to hit the right balance there.
GamesBeat: Do you feel like there were times when cheaters were getting an upper hand, when you had to pour more resources into this in some way?
Reavey: If you look back before Javelin, before EA had its own anti-cheat, that’s kind of the story there. For a while there each title was trying to figure out the answer on their own. At some point EA came together to pool resources and try to make a real push on this. That led to the creation of what’s now Javelin.
GamesBeat: What do you see ahead in the era of AI? I had a conversation with a technical guy, Glenn Fiedler, who’s the CEO of Network Next. He’s done a lot of open source code over time. He talked about a friend of his who suggested he look into the Fable 5 model and see what happened when he used it on his own code. Before this, he said he was very opposed to AI in games on principle. He didn’t see the value in it. Once he tried it out on his own code, though, he found tons and tons of vulnerabilities. The Fable 5 model was finding vulnerabilities that no human would ever exploit, because they’d never have the time to find or execute on them. That sent him into a bit of a panic. But he’s since learned to use Claude and patched up his work, because the model is also very useful for defense. What do you think?
Reavey: The good news is, we care deeply about making sure our code is as free of vulnerabilities as possible. We’ve always been willing to use whatever tools we need to make that happen. AI is real. It can help you in a lot of ways, both good and bad. We’re going to use whatever tools we can to try and keep our games as secure as possible. I think we’d be remiss to leave any tools on the ground if we want to take this fight seriously.
GamesBeat: It sounds like the pace at which you have to proceed might be getting pretty demanding. There’s a lot of stress on a team that has to keep up with this.
Reavey: The anti-cheat team is always feeling the pressure. There’s an active set of adversaries that we have to go up against, and there’s more of them than there is of us. They don’t rest at the same time we rest. All that said, you’re right. The pace is high. You can use tools to help increase your pace as well. For the same reason attackers can use tools to move faster, if we’re smart, we’ll use tools to move faster on defense. That’s exactly what the team is doing.
GamesBeat: Do you sound the same kind of alarm to other people in the industry?
Reavey: As a CISO, when I talk to my peers, other CISOs, absolutely. We look at what AI can do and the fact that it changes the equation in meaningful ways, the equation we may have been using for risk tolerance before. We have very active conversations around how we can do things now. How can we take what we used to do at human speed and now do it at machine speed? The attackers might be moving at machine speed now. There’s no strict checklist for all the right answers yet, but it’s something that any concerned CISO is talking about with their peers that are trying to hold back the badness.
GamesBeat: What about the worry that AI can be better at creating undetectable cheats and exploits?
Reavey: We hear about cheats that say they’re undetectable. I’d say that what’s undetectable today is probably detectable with the right solution. We can’t ever stop. With both anti-cheat and cyber, the game is never won, never over. Once again I’d point to the duality of it. The good news is the same tools that make bad guys able to do things, the defenders can use them as well. It’s on us as defenders to stay sharp and be able to figure out–if something says it’s undetectable, there’s probably an assumption behind it. Let’s go figure out how to break that assumption and find it. In general, when someone says a cheat is undetectable, that’s just a temporary statement. That’s not a permanent statement.
GamesBeat: Are those kinds of cheats harder to identify? I’ve been in games with people who are shooting through walls and never missing. It’s obvious that they’re cheating. But are there more subtle cheats that are harder to catch? What can people do that’s more clever?
Reavey: The things a cheat can do will vary, depending on what gives you advantage in a game. In some cases it’s the ability to see through walls, or aimbotting where you never miss. In some cases it’s just a reduction in recoil. Each shot is more on-target. It doesn’t move as much. Some sports games are even more different than that. Good shots on goal, great defense. That will vary a lot. The way we do detection against that varies as well.
There were claims about cheats that were undetectable because of the way they access game memory. They felt like the anti-cheat would be blind to this area of memory access. And yet we’ve blocked those cheats. There have been other people that have figured out how to block some of those cheats. Again, it gets pretty detailed, but generally, when you say something is undetectable, it’s because the cheat developer assumes some constraints. If you have a patch team that cares deeply, they’ll always fight against constraints and figure out a way to surprise and keep our players happy.
GamesBeat: There was a famous case where BurntPeanut was going up against someone and they discovered someone was using a cheat against them. When a creator gets involved, everyone is watching. Is that a new dimension to this?
Reavey: Sort of? Ultimately, as long as there’s a big population of people playing, there will be some group of them that are up to no good. Some of their motivations are financial. Some come from wanting attention. What we’ve seen is that the desire to cheat is almost steady relative to how popular and competitive the game is. The fact that there’s a new social component to games that makes games more fun and more popular–you see people’s desire to do something that they’re not supposed to do rising with that. I don’t know if it’s anything particularly unique, other than it’s another threat that we have to think about as we make sure things stay fair and fun.
GamesBeat: Do you compare notes across the industry with people from other companies?
Reavey: We do have forums where we can talk to each other. Both about security and about games. We do the game industry events and we do the security events. It’s a blended community in that way.
GamesBeat: There’s a bit of a privacy aspect to this. If you put security software on someone’s machine, you can get deeper security, but that also can be abused. There’s a risk of invading someone’s privacy. How do you balance the need to stop cheating while respecting privacy at the same time?
Reavey: That’s been important since day negative whatever, when we were designing what’s become Javelin. At some level the best solution is the obvious one. We won’t even run our anti-cheat unless the game itself is running. Some solutions may run all the time. Maybe someone puts something on the machine before they launch the game, so you should watch for that action. But we basically said we would constrain ourselves. Javelin will only execute and run once the game is launched. Similarly, we hope this never happens, but when you uninstall your last EA game with Javelin, Javelin will uninstall itself as well. It will no longer be on your computer.
We actually released a very transparent technical blog when we launched EA’s anti-cheat product to begin with. We wanted to be very transparent and communicative with people. This is how we’re trying to keep this balanced. This is what we require in order to see what’s going on in your game. Here’s how we try to make sure that that’s all we’re looking at, so you can trust us. That’s out there if you want to look at it. But I usually like to answer this question with the most straightforward answer, which is that we’re not going to run unless the game is running.
GamesBeat: Do you have to chase bad guys across games, or across companies as well? Does that become necessary?
Reavey: Cheat developers will often develop for more than one title, yes. We’ll chase that. The cheaters themselves–a lot of times they follow the fandom of whatever games they’re interested in. Sometimes that crosses titles and sometimes it doesn’t. For the most part, though, the population sticks to the games they love. They want an unfair advantage in the games they love to play.
GamesBeat: It seems like that’s occasionally where privacy comes up again. Companies can’t always share details about individuals with other companies without crossing a privacy line.
Reavey: When it comes to player privacy we take that incredibly seriously. Now, if there’s a cheating technique, or a cheat developer in the ecosystem, I think it’s fair game to talk about that so we can have better defenses. In general I’m happy with how the industry communicates. We realize that this is not good for the industry as a whole. We’d rather have games be fair for everyone and compete on the experience, not compete on the anti-cheat.
GamesBeat: Any last words you’d like to offer?
Reavey: I love the fact that I get to work with a team of people that care this much about this stuff. The only thing better than that is getting a chance to brag about it, so thanks for taking the time to let me share their story.