Two weeks before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 ships on October 23, Activision published its estimate of the business it is fighting: an $8.5 billion (£6.3 billion) a year market built from account sales, boosting and spoofing services. Independent anti-cheat firm Anybrain reached the same figure from the studio side.
Activision’s Side of the Ledger
Speaking ahead of Modern Warfare 4, Activision described cheating as a “multi-billion-dollar market” that generative AI has made harder to police. Its reported enforcement actions:
- More than 375 reseller operations disrupted through technical detection and legal action
- 31 primary cheat vendors shut down
- Over 70,000 hardware bans issued in the previous month
Anybrain: Cheating as a Service
Anybrain’s whitepaper The Rise of Cheating as a Service, published September 15 and based on a survey of 250 studios in the US and UK that ship competitive multiplayer games, quantifies the studio-side damage:
| Finding | Share of studios |
|---|---|
| Call cheating a significant or very significant problem | 69% |
| Saw measurable decline in player retention or revenue | 51% |
| Plan to increase anti-cheat spending in the next 12 months | 88% |
| Use anti-cheat as standard practice | 76% |
| Considering changing their anti-cheat approach within a year | 73% |
The survey drew on Intorqa’s findings, and 51% of respondents reported direct losses in retention or revenue — the number that converts cheating from a community complaint into a budget line.
“Cheating has evolved over the last 30 years into a highly advanced and continually changing industry.” — André Pimenta Ribeiro, CEO, Anybrain
Anybrain’s own framing is that cheating has moved “from something individual players did for an edge into a professionalized economy in its own right,” with generative AI shortening the time between a game patch and a working exploit.
Why the Numbers Agree
Activision’s $8.5bn is a demand-side figure: what cheaters pay for accounts, boosts and spoofing. Anybrain’s is supply-side: what 250 studios spend and lose. Both land on the same structure — a service economy with resellers, subscriptions and hardware-level bypasses, rather than a scattering of individual bad actors.
What Comes Next
The immediate test is Modern Warfare 4, the biggest release in the genre this year. The structural test is whether the 73% of studios considering a change actually switch providers — and whether AI-assisted detection keeps pace with AI-assisted cheats.
Sources
- IGN — Call of Duty Maker Activision Says the Video Game Cheat Market Generates $8.5 Billion a Year
- Eurogamer — Call of Duty maker Activision claims video game cheating is now a £6.3 billion ($8.5 billion) a year industry
- GamesIndustry.biz — Activision cites data claiming cheating in games is an $8.5bn industry
- Anybrain — The Cheating Problem (whitepaper 2026)
- Anybrain Blog — The Rise of Cheating As A Service
- GamesBeat — Over half of game developers have lost players or revenue to cheating