Comment by viraptor
2 days ago
It makes cheating harder and the timeline to a cheat product gets longer than the iteration speed of anticheat. Kind of like fancy locks don't prevent break ins, just take longer to pick and require more specialised tools.
As they say, locks only stop honest people.
They are wrong, though. Locks also stop people who would happily commit an opportunistic theft but who lack the necessary tools or skills, people who would trespass if they could retain some plausible deniability ("oops, I didn't see the signs" vs. "oops, I didn't realise I wasn't supposed to cut that padlock"), and so on.
The honest people are a larger group than the dishonest people.
And being real, the zero-day cheats are closely guarded and trickled out and sold for high prices as other cheats get found out, so for AAA games, the good cheats are priced out of comfort zone and anyone who attempts the lazy/cheap cheats is banned pretty quickly. A significant portion of the dishonest becomes honest through laziness or self-preservation. Only a select few are truly committed to dishonesty enough to put money and their accounts on the line.
Same way there are fewer murderers and thieves than there are non-murderers and non-thieves (at least in western countries).