Bungie has won a new lawsuit vs Destiny cheat makers and sellers, this time winning $ 12 million.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, one Mihai Claudiu-Florentin was sued by Bungie in 2021 for making cheat software called VeteranCheats.
VeteranCheats’ unique feature was allowing players to see through walls, giving cheaters a serious advantage over players who couldn’t enable such an ability in the game itself.
Bungie stated that this diminished enjoyment of the game, and in that way reduced potential revenue. While Destiny 2 is free-to-play, Bungie makes its money independently thanks to the large amount of DLC waiting players who play long enough to get addicted and wanting to catch up to everyone else.
From that perspective, it makes sense that cheats like VeteranCheats is ultimately taking revenue away from Bungie.
While this wasn’t part of the suit, it should also be mentioned that cheaters also ruin game design on a fundamental level.
Game studios put in a lot of effort into designing a particular game experience, from the very broad plans they have set out, to small details, as small as the sounds that each gun makes, to make them distinguishable from other guns.
Bungie won $ 12,059,912.98 in damages. $ 11,696,000 from that amount was taken from the 5,848 downloads that VeteranCheats had received. Bungie charged $ 2,000 for each download that occurred, and that’s how they came up with that staggering amount.
Claudiu-Florentin was also served a permanent injunction to keep him from producing any more Destiny cheats in the future.
This follows a string of legal victories and new lawsuits that Bungie has filed in the past few years. We had previously reported on lawsuits Bungie filed vs AimJunkies and LaviCheats, and a lawsuit Bungie filed with Ubisoft against Ring-1.
The common denominator in these suits is the fact that using video game cheats has yet to be deemed illegal. Thus far, these lawsuits don’t seem to have led to a ruling which makes cheats illegal.
That may be deliberate on Bungie’s part, because they may not want to be the ones setting the precedent that affects all games. Of course, what is a major issue for companies making online multiplayer games, could be a non-issue for developers making offline single-player games.
There are also some cases where the developers tolerate the use of some cheats, because they don’t necessarily harm the game experience or the game’s monetization. This was the case with Rockstar tolerating GTA’s online roleplay servers.
Bungie, for their part, seems determined to stamp out cheating out of Destiny for good.
