Irdeto, the world leader in digital platform cybersecurity, announces it is relaunching to the market a unique technology focused on behavioral biometric analysis for bot detection in video games. Denuvo Unbotify is able to identify bots in real-time with 99.8% accuracy.
New ways of cheating in online games – and getting away with it – are being developed on a disturbing scale. Both premium and “free to play” (F2P) games often offer rewards either in exchange for real-world currency or through “grinding” in the game, which takes significant time and effort. According to Statista, in 2020, profits made from microtransactions within “free-to-play” PC games were worth $22.7bn. The value of these rewards makes them an attractive prospect to bad actors, who can turn a profit by gaining them illegitimately using gaming bots and selling in-game assets to unscrupulous players at an attractive price. Although the assets being stolen from online games are virtual and theoretically infinite, theft results in fewer microtransactions for the game’s publisher.
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Here enters Denuvo Unbotify, the AI-driven technology that goes beyond detecting bots. It monitors all the interactions with the game through many elements, like the number of clicks, how fast the clicks happen and where they are taking place on the screen, the angle of the touch and if the phone is moving at all. The technology will read every sensor available and detect if there is something not happening as it should. All this information is sent to the cloud to compare with what is normal for that specific game, highlighting through anomaly detection who is operating outside the parameters. Unbotify has discovered that 5 to 15% of players use bots to get ahead in a game, and that 50% of players claim to have used a bot before.
The best games are designed to be labor intensive, to build experience through time and increase the value of the character. When currency becomes easily farmed or obtained through automation rather than earned at a regular pace by human players, that currency’s buying power can become weak. It results in fewer in-app purchases, churn, disinterested players and a damaged reputation. Unbotify discovered that an average of 10% of revenue is lost to in-app bots.
An additional industry challenge being faced is that cheaters are evolving from using software cheats to hardware cheats. Current anti-cheat technologies are able to detect any changes made to a PC, for example, but cannot detect any modifications made to the hardware, like a computer mouse. Cheaters are modifying the hardware giving it ultra-human capabilities, like the ability to click 100 times faster than any human could, creating an unfair advantage.
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Players gaining a competitive advantage through bots frustrates those who play fairly. It makes the game less fun and goes against the appeal of peer-to-peer online gaming. Denuvo Unbotify helps bring fairness back to gaming, a trademark of Denuvo solutions, making sure the playing field is leveled for legitimate gamers. Once a cheater is detected, the studio will be able to decide the course of action for that account.
The technology may even be required for survival in play-to-earn games, where players are rewarded with real money or crypto-currency for playing. There is a high incentive for bad actors to use bots to generate money “for free”.
Denuvo Unbotify filters are built from authentic user data obtained from specific in-game actions, which results in customized solutions for each game that it protects. Another important aspect is that all of the data collected excludes any and all identifiable information about each user. As a result, it fully complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
“The use of bots ruins the experience for legitimate players, but more importantly it also ruins the business model of publishers” said Steeve Huin, Chief Operating Officer of Video Games at Irdeto. “Denuvo Unbotify offers a pioneering approach to bot detection, using an AI to analyze behavioral biometrics and catch bots with maximum accuracy. It is a cool addition to our award-winning portfolio of gaming cybersecurity solutions and one that I am sure our clients will find tremendously beneficial”.
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