Bungie has revealed it has spent over £1.6million trying to stop cheats from impacting Destiny 2.
Last year, Bungie issued a £6.2million lawsuit against a copyright fraudster and settled for £10.7million out of court with one Destiny 2 cheat site. More recently, the company demanded £9.9million from another cheat site VeteranCheats.
In the paperwork filed alongside that claim, it was revealed (via TheGamePost) that Bungie has spent “a minimum of $2million (£1.646million) on game security and staffing” since November 2020. These measures included setting up “in-house cheat detection efforts [alongside] several forms of anti-cheat software, including but not limited to BattlEye”.
“Each of these pieces of cheat software functions differently and Bungie has been forced to combat each component independently,” continued the lawsuit. “The more complex and different the cheat is, the more expensive it is to combat.”
Bungie first filed a lawsuit against Destiny 2 cheat site VeteranCheats in September 2021. “Shortly afterward, Destiny 2 began to employ ‘BattlEye’ anti-cheat software in addition to Bungie’s in-house tools [and] we observed a rapid and several-fold increase in the advertised price of tracked boosting services [offered by VeteranCheats].”
“This correlation strongly suggests that cheat software is a practical necessity for that parasitic industry to function efficiently,” added Bungie’s deputy general counsel James Barker.
The suit went on to reveal that Bungie has spent an additional £179,000 on legal fees in their case against VeteranCheats, with the site blamed for causing reputational damage to Destiny 2, loss of income for Bungie and infringing on their copyright.
A majority of their £9.9million claim against VeteranCheats comes from the “5,848 separate transactions for either a Destiny 2 Cheat or a premium cheat product containing Destiny 2 as an option” handled by the website, with Bungie saying each transaction cost them £1643.
Last year, Bungie general counsel Don McGowan spoke about the importance of taking legal action against cheaters. “We have seen historically that bad actors will often be tolerated because the people with the skills and power to remove them do not focus their efforts there,” he said.
“To put it simply, we disagree,” he continued. “In our view, removing harassment and abuse from our community is not only the right thing to do, it is also good business.”
“We believe very strongly that most people do not want to be in communities where cheating or harassment is allowed to thrive. Tolerating bad actors chases away a lot of people who would like to enjoy our products.”
However, this week it was reported that one cheat site that Bungie took legal action against, has been allowed to file a counterclaim.
Bungie’s case against Aimjunkies was initially thrown out last April due to a lack of evidence, before it was resubmitted with more evidence.
AimJunkies filed a counter-complaint alleging that some of Bungie’s new evidence had been gained by accessing the PC of James May, a third-party cheat creator, without permission. That was initially dismissed last November but an amended claim has now been accepted (via Torrentfreak).
“May has cured deficiencies the Court previously identified in its earlier Order and many of the arguments Bungie raises in its motion to dismiss would be more appropriately presented in a motion for summary judgment or at trial,” wrote Judge Zilly.
In August, AimJunkies claimed that the company’s cheats had no effect on Destiny’s popularity.
In other news, the latest trailer for The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom has revealed the game’s antagonist alongside fresh gameplay footage that shows off Link’s enhanced Rune skills.
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