The Business of Apex Legends: Inside the Fight Against Cheaters

Apex Legends was a total gamble by Respawn Entertainment when it hit the shelves in 2019. Not many people foresaw a time when it would be ranked among the longest-living battle royales in the entire gaming industry. Now, almost seven years since its release, the way it's holding on is equally reliant on employing anti-cheat measures as on rolling out gameplay features.

The Scale of the Problem

Apex Legends has a player base of millions of monthly gamers, and where there is a large congregation of people, the cheaters will also come. According to the industry's guess work, around 1-3% of players in major shooter games could be using cheating software without their knowledge at any given moment. In the case of Apex, this implies that there are thousands of accounts that are using aimbots, wallhacks, and radar tools.

The cheats for modern Apex have become more advanced. Gamers have the ability to get an ESP system that can show the position of the enemy even if they are hidden behind the environment, aimbots with human-like tracking that imitate natural aiming, and radar overlays that provide a complete awareness of the situation. Some of them use DMA hardware, which reads memory directly from the PCIe bus, to completely evade the detection methods used so far.

Respawn's Custom Solution

Apart from licensing third-party anti-cheat solutions, Respawn collaborated with Epic Games to create their own version of Easy Anti-Cheat specifically for Apex Legends. This cooperation enables deeper game engine integration and quicker threat countermeasures.

The system is made up of different levels of security:

Kernel-level monitoring looks for code injections and unusual process behavior

Server-side validation calculates hit registration and player movements independently

Behavioral analysis identifies statistical outliers, players with unmatched accuracy or extremely fast reaction times

Hardware fingerprinting keeps track of components across account resets, ensuring that bans are effective

Machine learning models based on professional player data have been added in recent seasons, enhancing the system's capability to differentiate between skill and software.

The Underground Economy

Respawn's firm stance on the cheating problem has not managed to eradicate the problem, instead, it has simply forced it to go underground. Cheat developers have adopted the model of normal businesses, releasing different subscription levels, providing customer support 24/7 through Discord, and updating cheats quickly after every game patch.

Against the backdrop of Apex's custom EAC implementation, which is really hard to circumvent, prices are naturally high. In general, the more difficult a game is, the higher the price of the cheats. Several vendors are charging about $100-200 a month for so-called "private" cheats which have smaller user bases and hence, a lower risk of detection.

Many competitive Apex players turn to specialist providers like eshub for tools that maintain compatibility through every anti-cheat update, highlighting the ongoing arms race between Respawn and cheat creators.

What's Next

Even more anti-cheat measures for Apex Legends are in the pipeline from Respawn. As part of the latest round of security upgrades, ranked players will need to have TPM 2.0 enabled in their systems, and IOMMU enforcement will be introduced to prevent DMA attacks. On top of that, the developers are taking legal action against the main cheat creators and obtaining multiple millions in court fines.

Nonetheless, it is more like a cat-and-mouse game. Every option of detection gives birth to cheats. Every time a banning operation is done, it leads to the existence of new cheating tools.

Currently, Apex Legends is still very much alive and well on one hand, it shows Respawn's dedication, but on the other, it is also a clear illustration of the doggedness of those who are seeking to bring it down.