Like anyone else, game companies can be cheated, and I witnessed this several times. In 1993, we at id Software played Doom together over our internal network. Now, you have to realize that at the time, we thought few people would want to play by modem or over the nascent internet. But we wanted that functionality, because it was super fun and we liked it. Now, John Carmack didn't want to program the internet code. We hired a guy who lived in (IIRC) California to do the code remotely. The deal, as it was explained to me, was that he was finishing a project for his current company, and doing our code in his spare time, with his boss's knowledge. When his project was finished, he'd join us in Texas. Well, when we were ready for our internet code, we called his company in California and got the guy's boss. He laughed hard at us. He told us, "This guy is a good programmer, but he is a compulsive liar. He knows he can never hold a job anywhere else, and I get he hasn't done a lick of work on your connectivity stuff. He just took your money." Well ... the boss was right. We'd been swindled. Worse, we didn't have that code. So John Carmack spent 2 weeks quickly hammering together something that mostly worked, and then we released Doom. There was some kind of issue with the way we did it, that if Doom was being played with a lot of people on the same net, even if they weren't playing each other, it multiplied the information packets hugely and crashed the system. Within a month Doom was banned on basically every college campus in the country. So we hired someone to give us new, robust, code and in a month or two Doom was all it could be. Of course John Carmack's not to blame - his strength was in 3-D, not connectivity. Plus he had only 2 weeks to throw it together. That dude in California was the villain and he can rot. 1/4