ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

Respawn vows crack down on Apex Legends cheaters

Respawn vows crack down on Apex Legends cheaters

EA's Respawn Entertainment studio is going to be clamping down on cheaters in its battle royale game Apex Legends.

In a post on Twitter, the developer said that it was looking into several options to halt bad actors in the free-to-play title. This includes hiring more people to handle manual bands, as well as creating tools to detect and stop distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. Finally, Respawn is researching how to catch and boot cheaters in a quicker manner.

"Playing against cheaters sucks," the studio said in a subsequent post. "We'll keep you updated as we ship the above changes and pursue new ones."

Since its launch back in 2019, Apex Legends has been played by more than 100 million players. The title hit 291k concurrent users on Steam in May, following the launch of its ninth season of content, while Season 8 drew in "well over" 12 million weekly active users across all platforms. 

Cheating is – and always will be – an issue for online games, even those produced by huge triple-A companies. Activision has booted over 500k accounts from its own battle royale game, Call of Duty: Warzone. Meanwhile, Chinese tech and entertainment giant Tencent recently teamed up with local law enforcement in a huge bust of the "world's biggest" cheat maker.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.