A federal court has awarded Activision £11.3m ($14.4m) after it ruled in favour of the publisher’s lawsuit against cheat makers EngineOwning and Garnatz Enterprise Ltd, and 11 individual people.
As spotted by VentureBeat, the lawsuit, which was filed at the beginning of 2022, accuses the companies and individuals – Valentin Rick, Leonard Bugla, Leon Frisch, Marc-Alexander Richts, Alexander Kleeman, Leon Schlender, Bennet Huch, Ricky Szameitat, Remo Loffler, Charlie Wiest and Pascal Classen – of profiting from cheats and giving an unfair competitive advantage to players prepared to pay for auto-aim and auto-fire software cheats.
At the time, Activision said it sought “to put a stop to unlawful conduct by an organisation that is distributing and selling for profit numerous malicious software products designed to enable members of the public to gain unfair competitive advantages”, and described EngineOwning as a “German business entity… engaged in the development, sale, distribution, marketing, and exploitation of a portfolio of malicious cheats and hacks for popular online multiplayer games, most prominently the COD Games”.
After issuing the default judgement against the defendants, US District Court Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald in California also issued an injunction against the cheating site.
In related news, Bungie has also recently won a cheating lawsuit, this one against cheat and mod site, AimJunkies.
AimJunkies, aka Phoenix Digital, was instructed to pay the Destiny 2 developer $63,210 in damages – that’s the revenue the company is thought to have earned selling the cheats – setting a new precedent in what’s thought to be the first lawsuit wherein a jury has ruled on a game-cheating case.
The jury threw out AimJunkie’s countersuit that Bungie had illegally accessed one of its computers, but founder David Schaefer says they will “fight this” and appeal the verdict.
