10 GENIUS Ways Video Games Fought Cheaters

Online-only co-op actioner Outriders may not have set the world on fire when it released in 2018, but developers People Can Fly did come up with a neat way to deter cheaters after encountering a higher-than-expected volume of them during the game's demo period.

The devs issued a warning prior to the game's release, that they could tell who was cheating while playing the demo and vowed to "permanently brand" any re-offending players in the game proper with a "discreet but visible" spider-web watermark on their HUD's health bar, forever outing them as a bad egg.

Given that Outriders isn't a PvP game, cheating perhaps wasn't as egregious as it could've been, but all the same, the hope was that permanently altering a player's HUD robbed them of the glory of posting screengrabs of their in-game accomplishments.

Considering that players are only likely to cheat at Outriders for vanity reasons, to boast to others how far ahead they are, this was a pretty inventive way to invalidate that and make the cheaters consider the ultimate futility of their actions.