alt Hacker NewsI used to work at a game company fresh out of college, and this is simply untrue. The company made roughly 40% of sales from cheater whales (one can imagine how much the chest makers made), and there were guidelines on repeated bans where we recognized similarities to make sure we wouldn't ban them again too early.
I left the industry because of thah and the other things like loot boxes and matchmaking for profit and to push micro transactions. It's a terrible place.
I guess you worked somewhere where that was considered a good business strategy then. I worked at a large publisher for over 10 years on couple big competitive titles and the idea always was to get cheaters off our service asap and permanently, no matter their spend(in fact we couldn't see that and it never made any impact on our engineering decisions around the problem).
>>It's a terrible place.
Some companies sure.
And yes sorry I realize I said "no one does this" - let me correct myself to say that in my experience at a couple big publishers this isn't a strategy anyone pursues because it's not worth the losses to your legit playerbase and reputation. But there might be companies that do this, I concede.