correct. Cheaters drive legitimate players away, which costs money.
Just look at the early days of Battle.NET, where cheating and PK'ing was extremely rampant.
As a result very few legitimate players remained, and those that did often organised themselves into guilds and set out to kill the cheaters out of the game as a way of self policing the servers.

Blizzard caught on with Diablo 2 and made it a lot harder to cheat and PK, which made the environment a lot more pleasant.

And Blizzard wasn't at the time charging for access...

Yes i think they exist .. i think they are called Trainers and exploit memory hacks....

Post no2 in this very topic:
Then you come with:
You obviously copied J's reply, but why?

off-topic: What's going on with the game-dev forum lately? Is it just me or is it becoming a horrible mess of useless posts?

Niek

There are some "members" popping up all over the site who do nothing but copy entire posts from elsewhere.
In this case it was a message from the same thread, making it blatantly obvious, but more often it's something completely unrelated from somewhere else entirely.

I don't know whether these are bots or not, but they sure behave like bots.

<off-topic>

Agreed.. there's alot of "how do i make a game?" which is an unanswerable question without more detail; a bit of "how do i do [some thing] in [some commercial game]", which is nothing to do with games development; a load of other questions that either aren't worth answering or are too general to answer in less than an essay; and very few real support questions. But; the games forum's always been a bit like that; I guess that one 'games development board' in a big general IT site isn't gonna get the best conversation. Perhaps stricter and more visible rules could help; although, a sticky post is quite likely to get ignored; since the thread "Game Development FAQ's, Books and Resources" should give anyone asking "how do i make a game?" something to be reading.

The weekly spammer isn't much help either I don't think 'addy999' could be a bot; some of the stuff he's said in other posts is too stupid to have come outta a machine.

</off-topic>

<on-topic>

There's not really a moral question involved if you're modifying your own copy of a single player game.. maybe it breaches the software's licensing agreement, but those things are honestly too strict anyway. If I'm allowed to 'delete' the game, I'm allowed to modify the binary of the game, they can't restrict that because it's (rightfully) beyond the realm of protection afforded by a licence. If the game is multiplayer.. it's a different matter.

Anyway; if all you have is the game in binary, learning to modify it in any useful way will likely be harder than playing it through on hard-mode. If you wanna go ahead anyway; find out what executable format the game is in, and try compiling some small programs in that format, dissasembling them, and then making changes to the small program's functionality. The least you'll learn from that is a little about the executable format.. Also look for data/resource repositaries in the games folders or perhaps compressed into the executable; if you want to change configuration ( i.e. player/enemy health etc ), there's a good chance that it's stored as data rather than instructions. Not necessarily though, and the code and data might be protected/obfuscated; it'd be a hell of a task even if they weren't.

</on-topic>

Why do game developers put the option to cheat in their games anyway? To me it seems like a pointless exercise to play a game and cheat while doing it but maybe that's just me...???

because it's fun. You have to admit, some times it's cool to have unlimited ammo, or be invincible, or whatever. But these games don't allow cheats in online modes, however.

no. The options are put in to make testing easier (and in some cases possible).
It allows testers to take shortcuts through the game in order to reach spots that need to be tested more quickly.

They're usually left in because changing the code to take them out after testing is complete can introduce new bugs.

Ah good point jwentig

it expands the replayability