Interesting. I am not a gamer at all: so there is a market for cheating tools? How "legit" is it? Where do players go to buy cheats?
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Many major titles are using EAC currently, Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, etc. There's a pretty large market for cheats in any of those titles. Just dropping "<game> aimbot" or "<game> cheats" into google is likely to turn up a multitude of commercial cheat developers, many of which are legitimate and will bypass the current anti-cheat.
Generally the legitimate commercial cheat developers offer status pages detailing any of their cheats that are currently detected and offer additional tools to do things like bypass hardware ID detection if you did get banned in the past.
> bypass the current anti-cheat
Maybe I'm clueless but as I understand it some of these shooters (e.g. PUBG) are games that you pay for. If one of these commercial cheats gets detected by EAC isn't the result a permaban of your paid for account? And then you have to buy the game again and make a new one, if that's possible at all? Seems like that would be a serious deterrent, although obviously it won't stop everyone. (Encountering a cheater once out of every ten matches is probably acceptable. Encountering one in every other match probably isn't.)
If you are into cheating, new licenses are just a cost of business. Even a new, full price AAA game is about the cost of a round of golf. Furthermore, with free to play and microtransactions/ongoing ways to get revenue from players, there's a growing incentive to either give the game away (Fortnite et all) or offer the game at a fairly low price (eg rainbow 6 siege, can be had for as little as $5).
AFAIK, some of the top cheats are SaaS products and require a lot of money (e.g. > $50/month for a game like Escape from Tarkov).
So yes, that's a deterrent but not for those willing to pay a price equal to the game for monthly access.
If you are willing to pay for a cheat then rebuying the game every few months when there is a ban wave is not that much effort. Especially if you buy it from some shady CD-Key reseller.
I've found that the biggest marketplaces are on the Chinese web, places like taobao have a HUGE number. Also Russian social networks as well.