I’m an indie game developer (3 years at current company). Here’s a brief summary of the anti-piracy/anti-cheat history we did -
We noticed people were uploading old versions of our games on 3rd party app stores, so we introduced a feature that makes the game refuse to start if it’s on too old of a version
When we later updated the minimum SDKs, and older devices couldn’t update, we had inadvertently remotely bricked a perfectly functional game on their device
To prevent cheaters from figuring out how the game worked, we removed all logging from the application
EVEN TODAY I spent multiple hours and an Uber to get my hands on a specific device that was having crash issues because whatever logs I could get remotely weren’t nearly suffice to debug an issue
People were cheating Unity’s IAP store, so we installed a plugin that validated IAPs.
IAPs took multiple more seconds to process, hurting legit buyers
The cheating metrics went down, but because fewer people were buying IAPs, our rankings tanked on various ad networks
Hackers were making modded clients, so we added obfuscation
This made our builds much more harder to debug, and adds yet another step in our build pipeline
Users were editing values in memory to give themselves more levels and beat the leaderboard
We manually banned them from the leaderboard. It takes like 5 seconds and happens once a week, not a big deal
Users were editing values in memory for more coins
It doesn’t affect us in any way, at this point we stopped caring