>> Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.
One thing this is missing is that forcing addicted players to buy again helps bring in the cash flow, so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation for the shadier game companies (usually the big ones) will go ahead and never rescind a ban.
Literally no one does this in the industry, even if it sounds like a great idea on paper. Every big publisher knows that cheaters always bring negative cashflow to your company because they put off other players from playing. A single cheater in a 20 player game can put half of them off playing again, tarnishing your reputation at the same time. There is no universe in which "we'll just make cheaters buy our game again" makes any financial or any other sense - the goal is to get them to stop playing, permanently, and be enough of a pain in the ass that they never buy your game again.
>> so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation
I've never seen any data that would support this. It just doesn't happen - if you accidentally ban a legit player they just get really pissed off and there's about 0% chance they will give you money again. Which is why you try extremely hard to not do that.
I 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.
One thing this is missing is that forcing addicted players to buy again helps bring in the cash flow, so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation for the shadier game companies (usually the big ones) will go ahead and never rescind a ban.