Cybercriminals are targeting the $116 billion game industry.
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How to stop losing revenues and players to cyberattacks

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 21 min

The video game market has grown to $116 billion worldwide, and that makes it a big target for cyber criminals.

Sony felt the sting of cyberattacks in 2011 when hacktivist group Anonymous took down its PlayStation Network. That forced Sony’s CEO to apologize to all of the company’s game customers. But that was hardly the only attack. Video game publishers lose up to 40 percent of their in-game revenue and microtransactions to fraud each year, and ransomware has taken off as well. In 2016, Valve disclosed that Steam Stealer malware was compromising 77,000 accounts a month.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.