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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, who would buy it? It would be radioactive for any competitor. Even if they were willing to pay for it and launder the funds used, releasing any games that used any EA secret sauce would very likely be detectable. They'd need engage in a parallel construction of source code history to show how they arrived at their implementation independently.

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It's useful for devs of multiplayer game cheats.

Is there much money to be made in those? Honest question; I don't play games at all.

Yes, and it's mind-boggling:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56579449

Wait i couldn't figure out exactly why they were arrested. Is it illegal to sell video games cheats in china? Was it at the request of the game devs involved? Or maybe money laundering? Even assuming that online cheating is illegal there for some baffling reason... why would the Chinese police care about cheaters on western video games when its not even illegal here? That bbc article is a bit frustrating, just not a lot of useful info there.

I would hazard definitely given how rampant online game cheating is across competitive shooters. People give grief to Blizzard, Steam, etc for their overzealous methods of detecting cheats and possibly increasing the vulnerabilities of your own machine but without some form of way to ban or detect cheats competitive online gaming would be a dead market. It's a cat vs mouse market and I know back when I was playing WoW every day there was a huge market for buying bots to harvest in-game resources and fishing.

It would be interesting data to compare the "fence value" against the "book value". Often infosec decisionmaking is argued based on value-at-risk, and while everyone knows you don't actually lose much if any of the value if someone leaks the sources, it's still used in some sufficiently brazen exaggerations.

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