2024 Digital Ecosystem Summit, held on September 5th and 6th at the Shenzhen World Convention and Exhibition Center, unveiled a new era of technological innovation and digital transformation. The event showcased how AI-powered cloud solutions are revolutionizing industries, enhancing productivity, and creating boundless opportunities for growth.
Anti-Cheat Expert attended the summit and participated in the fireside chat with the topic: Revolutionizing Player Experiences and Development Efficiency in the Gaming Industry. During the chat, Anti-Cheat Expert shared our experience in the gaming industry and how AI can affects it. Here is part of the interview：
Q1: Let's start by briefly introducing your team and sharing your experience in the gaming industry.
A1: Hello everyone, we are Anti-Cheat Expert team. As our name suggests, our team is to protect games from cheats. Our team was established back in 2005 to protect Tencent Games. In recent years, thanks to our technical expertise, we've also protect many games from other gaming studios. We have extensive experience in anti-cheat for both PC and mobile games, as well as in content moderation. We have protected many well-know games around the world.
Q2: The gaming industry has seen significant shifts recently, including rounds of layoffs, need for cost optimization, and increasing complexity of games. How are these trends shaping the industry, and what are the biggest challenges that gaming companies are currently facing?
A2: We'll focus on the changes in the game security industry over the past few years.
According to the latest statistics from Anti-Cheat Expert Team, even though the growth rate of the Chinese game market is slowing, game security issues are on the rise, not decreasing. The main issues include cheats, content security, gold farming studios, DDoS attacks, power leveling, and game 'Griefer.'
Just looking at our data from last year, the average monthly volume of detected cheats for PC games increased nearly 50% compared to 2022, and the numbers for mobile games also significantly exceeded those of 2022. Moving to this year, 2024, we've just released our Game Security Insights Report for the first half of the year, which also shows a growth in cheat numbers for both PC and mobile games, exceeding 12%. This clearly shows that game security issues do not diminish even as the pace of the game industry slows.
Q3: Cloud services are essential for scaling operations and driving innovation. How are companies using Tencent Cloud's technology (PGOS, ACE) to enhance player experience and game performance? Can you share one or two examples?
A3: As a gaming company, regardless of the type of games, it's crucial to have a strong awareness of game security. This is because the quality of the gaming environment would directly affects a game's reputation and the players' experience. Anti-cheat efforts are particularly unique; they require a substantial accumulation of resources—building a cheat database, developing anti-cheat technologies, and crafting security operation strategies.
Therefore, for small to medium-sized game companies, it's important to consider implementing security measures early on when launching a game. Currently, the most cost-effective strategy is to find a reliable game security service team. This can greatly save resources for the game project, allowing the team to focus their efforts on game development. We have collaborated with clients like 'Sausage Man,' 'Ninja Must Die,' and the 2D game 'Back to 1999,' helping them address specific cheating probelms.
Q4: AI is becoming a key player in game development and operations. Can you share how AI is being applied in your projects to improve efficiency, enhance the development process, or create more personalized and immersive gaming experience?
A4: AI can indeed help us address some game security issues effectively. With the continuous development of us, many scenarios in game security can benefit from AI.
On the one hand, it reduces the human resource investment required by game developers.
On the other hand, the accuracy of judgments made by AI's deep learning algorithms is continually improving. I wanna share some examples of them to share how Anti-Cheat Expert team use AI:
1. AI Could Detect Cheating Players : There is a feature called Replay, which records all player interactions during a game session. This data includes every player’s actions, allowing us to recreate the entire session by replaying these files. We leverage this feature to obtain pixel-level visibility data between players and real-time game data through customized deep detection schemes. By training multimodal deep learning models and continuously optimizing them, we achieve high-coverage and accurate detection of mainstream cheats and malicious behaviors. This makes Replay a robust, real-time, and universal security solution that does not rely on client-side controls or specific samples, effectively suppressing unknown cheats and high-level cheating.
2. AI Could Identifying Unknown Cheats: Traditional cheat detection often requires manually defining features or signatures, which is time-consuming and can miss important features due to human error. AI, through deep learning algorithms, can automatically learn and extract features or signatures from data, greatly enhancing detection efficiency and accuracy. AI models can not only detect current known cheats but also predict potential and unknown cheats, providing early warnings.
3. AI Could Detect Economic Black Markets: AI helps game developers effectively deal with black market behaviors. Through data analysis and pattern recognition, AI can identify the characteristics and patterns of such behaviors and take timely countermeasures. Our solution has evolved from traditional machine learning to deep learning, enabling more precise detection of black accounts and transactions, providing solid grounds for action against them.
4. AI Could Assist in the Recognition of Illegal Texts, Images, and Voices: In content moderation solution, AI algorithms use deep learning and natural language processing to collect and store texts, voices, and images used for player interaction within games. They can automatically identify content that includes malicious, abusive, or violent elements and process them promptly. Through extensive training samples, the system enables machines to learn and optimize on their own, improving the accuracy and efficiency of content review.
Q5: In light of the technology advances and heightened player expectations, what advice would you give to game developers and companies looking to leverage Tencent Cloud in their projects?
A5: Our advice is to leave professional tasks to professional teams. Highly technical challenges are difficult to tackle quickly in terms of building capability and resources to develop a competitive solution. Therefore, seeking assistance from a team like ACE to help solve complex problems is a particularly wise choice.
