The upcoming release of Skyrim's Anniversary Edition could end up hurting the game's modding scene, and will likely mean a considerable amount of work for modders on the game.

If you've been adding mods to your version of Skyrim over the years, then it's quite likely that you might have come across the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE) plugin, which is used to help run a number of different popular mods for the game. It's also likely that you'll have adjusted your update settings for the game on Steam and use a separate mod manager to launch the game. If you don't do this, then there's a risk that the SKSE can break every time that the Bethesda Creation Club receives a new update.

As reported by PC Gamer, when Skyrim's Anniversary Edition launches next month, copies purchased by players will not only include the Special Edition version of the game, but also all of the mods currently included in the Creation Club and more. However, unlike previous iterations of Skyrim that have come as new releases, Skyrim's Anniversary Edition will instead come as an update for the existing game - a factor that is likely to cause huge problems for a range of the mods currently using the SKSE and other similar plugins.

The main reason that this comes as an issue is because as part of its update, Bethesda has made the decision to change up the game's compiler from the 2015 version of Visual Studios to its 2019 counterpart. As SKSE developer, extrwi notes, this will cause problems for the modding community because it "changes the way that the code is generated in a way that forces mod developers to start from scratch finding functions and writing hooks."

Skyrim's modding community has been pretty incredible over the last few years, but in that time a number of modders have moved onto new projects. The upshot is that, once a popular mod breaks, it's possible no one will be able to fix it. "Doing this work takes a reasonable amount of time for each plugin," explains extrwi.

"I can probably sit there over a few nights and bang out an updated version of SKSE, but my main concern is for the rest of the plugins out there. The plugin ecosystem has been around long enough that people have moved on, and code is left unmaintained. Effectively everyone who has written a native code plugin will need to do at least some amount of work to support AE. This realistically means that the native code mod scene is going to be broken for an unknown length of time after AE's release."

The developer recommended that those using mods within the game should back up their executables of the game now and disable updates in Steam before the Anniversary Edition launches on November 11.

For more from the Skyrim modding community make sure to check out our interview with the modders behind the Skyrim mod aiming to make the version of Oblivion Bethesda couldn't in 2006.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

The upcoming release of Skyrim's Anniversary Edition could end up hurting the game's modding scene, and will likely mean a considerable amount of work for modders on the game.

If you've been adding mods to your version of Skyrim over the years, then it's quite likely that you might have come across the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE) plugin, which is used to help run a number of different popular mods for the game. It's also likely that you'll have adjusted your update settings for the game on Steam and use a separate mod manager to launch the game. If you don't do this, then there's a risk that the SKSE can break every time that the Bethesda Creation Club receives a new update.

As reported by PC Gamer, when Skyrim's Anniversary Edition launches next month, copies purchased by players will not only include the Special Edition version of the game, but also all of the mods currently included in the Creation Club and more. However, unlike previous iterations of Skyrim that have come as new releases, Skyrim's Anniversary Edition will instead come as an update for the existing game - a factor that is likely to cause huge problems for a range of the mods currently using the SKSE and other similar plugins.

The main reason that this comes as an issue is because as part of its update, Bethesda has made the decision to change up the game's compiler from the 2015 version of Visual Studios to its 2019 counterpart. As SKSE developer, extrwi notes, this will cause problems for the modding community because it "changes the way that the code is generated in a way that forces mod developers to start from scratch finding functions and writing hooks."

Skyrim's modding community has been pretty incredible over the last few years, but in that time a number of modders have moved onto new projects. The upshot is that, once a popular mod breaks, it's possible no one will be able to fix it. "Doing this work takes a reasonable amount of time for each plugin," explains extrwi.

"I can probably sit there over a few nights and bang out an updated version of SKSE, but my main concern is for the rest of the plugins out there. The plugin ecosystem has been around long enough that people have moved on, and code is left unmaintained. Effectively everyone who has written a native code plugin will need to do at least some amount of work to support AE. This realistically means that the native code mod scene is going to be broken for an unknown length of time after AE's release."

The developer recommended that those using mods within the game should back up their executables of the game now and disable updates in Steam before the Anniversary Edition launches on November 11.

For more from the Skyrim modding community make sure to check out our interview with the modders behind the Skyrim mod aiming to make the version of Oblivion Bethesda couldn't in 2006.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad Director James Gunn wants to create a twisted take on Gilligan's Island.

Responding to a Twitter challenge to "pitch a movie with two pictures, no caption," Gunn posted a picture of the cast of Gilligan's Island alongside an image depicting cannibalism. In a follow-up tweet, Gunn said the idea wasn't meant to be a joke.

"A true story: In the late 90’s screenwriting GOAT Charlie Kaufman pitched a movie version of Gilligan’s Island where the islanders, starving & desperate, started killing & eating each other," Gunn wrote. "Warner Bros wanted to do it - but Sherwood Schwartz, the creator, said no way."

A true story: In the late 90’s screenwriting GOAT Charlie Kaufman pitched a movie version of Gilligan’s Island where the islanders, starving & desperate, started killing & eating each other. Warner Bros wanted to do it - but Sherwood Schwartz, the creator, said no way.

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) October 13, 2021

Gunn says he later tried to resurrect the idea, but Sherwood Schwartz's estate said no.

The classic 1960s sitcom originally ran for three seasons from 1964 to 1967. The show featured seven castaways stranded on an island after a "three-hour tour" goes horribly wrong. The episodes depict the main characters working together to survive on the island, despite their lifestyle differences. In Gunn's proposed version, it seems things wouldn't have gone quite as swimmingly.

Gunn is currently busy with multiple superhero projects. Besides the release of The Suicide Squad earlier this year, he's also behind the upcoming Peacemaker spinoff starring John Cena. On the Marvel side, he's working on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 which recently cast the role of Adam Warlock.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad Director James Gunn wants to create a twisted take on Gilligan's Island.

Responding to a Twitter challenge to "pitch a movie with two pictures, no caption," Gunn posted a picture of the cast of Gilligan's Island alongside an image depicting cannibalism. In a follow-up tweet, Gunn said the idea wasn't meant to be a joke.

"A true story: In the late 90’s screenwriting GOAT Charlie Kaufman pitched a movie version of Gilligan’s Island where the islanders, starving & desperate, started killing & eating each other," Gunn wrote. "Warner Bros wanted to do it - but Sherwood Schwartz, the creator, said no way."

A true story: In the late 90’s screenwriting GOAT Charlie Kaufman pitched a movie version of Gilligan’s Island where the islanders, starving & desperate, started killing & eating each other. Warner Bros wanted to do it - but Sherwood Schwartz, the creator, said no way.

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) October 13, 2021

Gunn says he later tried to resurrect the idea, but Sherwood Schwartz's estate said no.

The classic 1960s sitcom originally ran for three seasons from 1964 to 1967. The show featured seven castaways stranded on an island after a "three-hour tour" goes horribly wrong. The episodes depict the main characters working together to survive on the island, despite their lifestyle differences. In Gunn's proposed version, it seems things wouldn't have gone quite as swimmingly.

Gunn is currently busy with multiple superhero projects. Besides the release of The Suicide Squad earlier this year, he's also behind the upcoming Peacemaker spinoff starring John Cena. On the Marvel side, he's working on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 which recently cast the role of Adam Warlock.

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

For as long as there have been games, there has been cheating. In Norway, for example, archaeologists discovered a 600-year old wooden dice carved without the numbers “1” or “2.” Nicknamed the “cheating dice,” you can imagine why such a wooden thing was carved by ye olde dice throwers.

Nowadays, games are a bit more sophisticated than six-sided dice, but so are the cheats. Some of the world’s biggest games today – Call of Duty, League of Legends, and Destiny 2 – are almost exclusively played online, and are inviting targets for enterprising cheaters. But in the era of live-service games, fighting cheaters is more important than ever.

As cheats continue to proliferate and impact the most popular online games, developers have begun developing stronger and stronger anti-cheat measures. Not just to improve the player experience, but ensure their game’s survival.

The War on Cheats

There’s a veritable buffet of cheat options for players looking to have an unfair advantage in a game — whether they want programs to help them shoot through walls or automatically aim for a perfect headshot. Or, for a little bit more money, both.

There are many reasons why people cheat, from the obvious over-zealous competitiveness games can bring out in some to plain curiosity. At worst, some cheaters do it just to ruin the fun for someone else.

“Cheating in games is like asking why the sky is blue. You’ll get a ton of different answers and perspectives, but there’s no definite answer for either one,” writes cheat maker IWantCheats. “The truth about cheating in gaming varies from person to person — some might do it because they’re addicted or think that their life will be better if they win more often while others become hackers out of sheer curiosity or frustration at being beaten by less talented players than themselves.”

Whatever the root causes, cheat developers are certainly cashing in on the demand. Earlier this year, Chinese authorities arrested a cheat-making group known as “Chicken Drumstick,” who have reportedly made over $70 million selling PUBG Mobile cheats alone.

As the adage goes, if you’re good at something never do it for free, and cheat sellers have created increasingly sophisticated operations to peddle their wares. The most popular cheats for ongoing games are offered to players as subscriptions rather than one-time purchases. Cheat makers will justify this by citing the constant updates required to stay ahead of game developers’ latest anti-cheat advances.

And that constant work doesn’t just apply to single games – cheat makers are constantly evaluating what the next big game for cheating will be, and getting to work on how to break it. Even games that aren’t mega-hits quite yet have had cheats developed for them. A scroll through one popular cheats website offers hacks for popular games like Apex Legends and Warzone, but also smaller titles like Bloodhunt, Outriders, and Hood: Outlaws and Legends.

Perhaps more concerningly, cheats are being released for games that haven’t even been formally released yet. Call of Duty: Vanguard and Battlefield 2042, both games released for open beta testing, have been hit by cheats before their official release date.

Video game developers have stood firm against cheaters in the past, but this year several major games have announced deeper anti-cheat implementation as a blockbuster feature. In some cases, anti-cheat is now announced with the same fanfare as new gameplay modes or graphical upgrades. While unveiling Call of Duty: Vanguard, Activision revealed that the massively popular Call of Duty: Warzone spin-off will receive a “multi-faceted, new anti-cheat system. In August, Bungie announced it will work with BattlEye to bring a comprehensive anti-cheat to Destiny 2. Both announcements were received by some with the fervor often reserved for new modes or features.

But the increase in anti-cheat hasn’t deterred cheat-makers. In fact, it may have spurred many of them on.

“COD anti-cheat has a pretty spotty history since it was first implemented. When the initial implementation came out, COD cheaters were able to circumvent this method and continue playing with their hacks in cheat mode,” IWantCheats boasts, while promoting its Vanguard cheats.

“As of right now, there is no sign that the anti-cheat program will go away with Activision’s newest version of Call of Duty… However, we are also confident that this will not last forever,” IWantCheats writes. “Our developers have grown accustomed to working against COD anti-cheat and we’re sure that our team can circumvent it for the foreseeable future, barring any unexpected changes in their technology.”

A quality anti-cheat, now, is paramount for any popular online shooter. The problem for those implementing them, however, is that players and developers didn’t always see eye-to-eye on the best ways to add robust anti-cheat to games.

Anti-Cheat: The Devil You Know

To see how the perception of anti-cheats has changed in just the last year alone, one doesn’t have to look further than Riot Games’ own Vanguard anti-cheat system (not to be confused with the new Call of Duty subtitle). When Vanguard was announced alongside the company’s competitive shooter, Valorant, there was vocal concern among players that the system was too invasive. Kernel-mode drivers — like Vanguard and Activision’s recently announced Call of Duty: Warzone anti-cheat, Ricochet — gain a deeper level of access to your PC. For anti-cheats, this access allows for better monitoring of cheat software without the limitations of user-mode applications. But they also require a level of trust between players and game developers.

Ultimately, claims that Vanguard is practically malware were unfounded, but the controversy around it was one of the biggest stories in 2020.

Fast-forward a year later and Vanguard is considered one of the more effective anti-cheat tools around. It’s now regarded well enough that a popular Reddit post on r/ApexLegends asks members if Vanguard could be implemented in Respawn’s popular battle royale.

Philip Koskinas is Riot Games’ anti-cheat lead and spoke with IGN to offer an insider’s perspective on the changing perception of anti-cheat software. It didn’t begin well.

“We dug our heels in and ate all the bad press you could possibly get,” Koskinas says. “We’re getting called nation-state malware, every single YouTube video was suddenly an expert on kernel drivers telling us how many secrets we were stealing or whatever. None of that was true.”

Koskinas says he doesn’t want to dismiss legitimate concerns about what players might have to give up to have a fair game, but says that as time goes on it’s become the “expectation that if you are going to compete in the first-person space, you use [anti-cheat]. Especially now that anti-cheat is considered a competitive advantage in Twitch shooters and anywhere where aim matters.”

Having a reliable anti-cheat, then, is what separates the most popular games from others, and boasting a low cheating count is now a selling point for developers.

As you might expect, developer investment in anti-cheat comes from a financial imperative, too. As games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Fortnite continue to generate massive revenue for companies, it’s important to protect that investment. This means keeping players engaged, and as it turns out players don’t want to engage with a game if there are cheaters everywhere.

“One of the things we were able to show, that I think really demonstrated the value of anti-cheat, is that after encountering a cheater and utilizing the report tool to identify that person as a cheater, the likelihood that a player quits triples,” Koskinas says.

“It’s actually worse in the first-person-shooter genre. After encountering a cheater, the likelihood that you stop playing for a week or more is like [five times higher when] compared to a player that hasn’t encountered one. We have a churn.”

The result is that developers like Riot are pouring more and more effort into their anti-cheat solutions – but as anti-cheats become faster and more iterative, so too have the cheats.

“10 years ago, cheats were often distributed by one to three primary providers who would have a large user base of thousands that spent most of the time undetected, and they’d be detected in waves,” Koskinas explains. “But due to how fast anti-cheats these days iterate, the cheating community tends to be comprised of up to a hundred, two hundred, in some scenes, maybe even a thousand different cheats,” Koskinas adds that it’s not just a case of searching for a single code base to detect the many, many cheats, either – some cheats with similar effects may take very different techniques to detect.

The more cheats emerge, the more expensive this all becomes. “The Vanguard team alone is a nightmare to the checkbook,” Koskinas says. First-party anti-cheat teams aren’t developing cosmetics or battle passes that will eventually be sold to players – they’re building tools so that players stick around their games at all.

Where Does It End?

Dice-throwers were cheating 600 years ago, and they’re cheating in games today. A stricter anti-cheat won’t deter some players looking for that extra edge, nor those making money out of them.

“I don’t know if this is statistically the case, but the more people that play, the more people that will ultimately become interested in at least Googling the word cheat,” Koskinas explains. From what the Vanguard team has observed for both League of Legends and Valorant, if a person cheats at least twice, they’ll continue to do so. “If you do it twice, I’ve never seen anyone come back.”

So, as long as cheating remains, anti-cheat in games will only become more important. But there are long-term solutions in the works. One “holy grail” anti-cheat Koskinas spoke about is the ability to distinguish mouse inputs from automated inputs — detecting the difference between humans and AI — through machine learning. But even this will require regular iterations and improvements from a dedicated software team.

You can also focus on protecting, at the very least, the core product. Activision is making sure that one of its most successful titles ever, Call of Duty: Warzone will receive a dedicated anti-cheat, while Epic Games acquired Easy Anti-Cheat after Fortnite became a worldwide hit (it is free for other developers to use). Of course, these are solutions that only the biggest, richest game creators can afford.

For Valorant specifically, Riot’s core focus is its prized ranked mode. “There tends to be a larger investigative effort into people that are higher ranked,” Koskinas says. For the Riot Anti-Cheat team, this means making sure that the top echelons of Ranked mode, defined as the top 20% of Ranked matches, are completely free of cheating.

So far Vanguard’s efforts are paying off. Even though the “variety and the amount of [cheats that are] available are probably at an all-time high,” as far as Valorant is concerned cheaters are at “an all-time low.”

When I congratulated Koskinas on this, Koskinas smiled. “I’d prefer if nobody cheated. A goal without a plan is a dream? I think that’s the phrase.”

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Original Illustration by Saniya Ahmed.

For as long as there have been games, there has been cheating. In Norway, for example, archaeologists discovered a 600-year old wooden dice carved without the numbers “1” or “2.” Nicknamed the “cheating dice,” you can imagine why such a wooden thing was carved by ye olde dice throwers.

Nowadays, games are a bit more sophisticated than six-sided dice, but so are the cheats. Some of the world’s biggest games today – Call of Duty, League of Legends, and Destiny 2 – are almost exclusively played online, and are inviting targets for enterprising cheaters. But in the era of live-service games, fighting cheaters is more important than ever.

As cheats continue to proliferate and impact the most popular online games, developers have begun developing stronger and stronger anti-cheat measures. Not just to improve the player experience, but ensure their game’s survival.

The War on Cheats

There’s a veritable buffet of cheat options for players looking to have an unfair advantage in a game — whether they want programs to help them shoot through walls or automatically aim for a perfect headshot. Or, for a little bit more money, both.

There are many reasons why people cheat, from the obvious over-zealous competitiveness games can bring out in some to plain curiosity. At worst, some cheaters do it just to ruin the fun for someone else.

“Cheating in games is like asking why the sky is blue. You’ll get a ton of different answers and perspectives, but there’s no definite answer for either one,” writes cheat maker IWantCheats. “The truth about cheating in gaming varies from person to person — some might do it because they’re addicted or think that their life will be better if they win more often while others become hackers out of sheer curiosity or frustration at being beaten by less talented players than themselves.”

Whatever the root causes, cheat developers are certainly cashing in on the demand. Earlier this year, Chinese authorities arrested a cheat-making group known as “Chicken Drumstick,” who have reportedly made over $70 million selling PUBG Mobile cheats alone.

As the adage goes, if you’re good at something never do it for free, and cheat sellers have created increasingly sophisticated operations to peddle their wares. The most popular cheats for ongoing games are offered to players as subscriptions rather than one-time purchases. Cheat makers will justify this by citing the constant updates required to stay ahead of game developers’ latest anti-cheat advances.

And that constant work doesn’t just apply to single games – cheat makers are constantly evaluating what the next big game for cheating will be, and getting to work on how to break it. Even games that aren’t mega-hits quite yet have had cheats developed for them. A scroll through one popular cheats website offers hacks for popular games like Apex Legends and Warzone, but also smaller titles like Bloodhunt, Outriders, and Hood: Outlaws and Legends.

Perhaps more concerningly, cheats are being released for games that haven’t even been formally released yet. Call of Duty: Vanguard and Battlefield 2042, both games released for open beta testing, have been hit by cheats before their official release date.

Video game developers have stood firm against cheaters in the past, but this year several major games have announced deeper anti-cheat implementation as a blockbuster feature. In some cases, anti-cheat is now announced with the same fanfare as new gameplay modes or graphical upgrades. While unveiling Call of Duty: Vanguard, Activision revealed that the massively popular Call of Duty: Warzone spin-off will receive a “multi-faceted, new anti-cheat system. In August, Bungie announced it will work with BattlEye to bring a comprehensive anti-cheat to Destiny 2. Both announcements were received by some with the fervor often reserved for new modes or features.

But the increase in anti-cheat hasn’t deterred cheat-makers. In fact, it may have spurred many of them on.

“COD anti-cheat has a pretty spotty history since it was first implemented. When the initial implementation came out, COD cheaters were able to circumvent this method and continue playing with their hacks in cheat mode,” IWantCheats boasts, while promoting its Vanguard cheats.

“As of right now, there is no sign that the anti-cheat program will go away with Activision’s newest version of Call of Duty… However, we are also confident that this will not last forever,” IWantCheats writes. “Our developers have grown accustomed to working against COD anti-cheat and we’re sure that our team can circumvent it for the foreseeable future, barring any unexpected changes in their technology.”

A quality anti-cheat, now, is paramount for any popular online shooter. The problem for those implementing them, however, is that players and developers didn’t always see eye-to-eye on the best ways to add robust anti-cheat to games.

Anti-Cheat: The Devil You Know

To see how the perception of anti-cheats has changed in just the last year alone, one doesn’t have to look further than Riot Games’ own Vanguard anti-cheat system (not to be confused with the new Call of Duty subtitle). When Vanguard was announced alongside the company’s competitive shooter, Valorant, there was vocal concern among players that the system was too invasive. Kernel-mode drivers — like Vanguard and Activision’s recently announced Call of Duty: Warzone anti-cheat, Ricochet — gain a deeper level of access to your PC. For anti-cheats, this access allows for better monitoring of cheat software without the limitations of user-mode applications. But they also require a level of trust between players and game developers.

Ultimately, claims that Vanguard is practically malware were unfounded, but the controversy around it was one of the biggest stories in 2020.

Fast-forward a year later and Vanguard is considered one of the more effective anti-cheat tools around. It’s now regarded well enough that a popular Reddit post on r/ApexLegends asks members if Vanguard could be implemented in Respawn’s popular battle royale.

Philip Koskinas is Riot Games’ anti-cheat lead and spoke with IGN to offer an insider’s perspective on the changing perception of anti-cheat software. It didn’t begin well.

“We dug our heels in and ate all the bad press you could possibly get,” Koskinas says. “We’re getting called nation-state malware, every single YouTube video was suddenly an expert on kernel drivers telling us how many secrets we were stealing or whatever. None of that was true.”

Koskinas says he doesn’t want to dismiss legitimate concerns about what players might have to give up to have a fair game, but says that as time goes on it’s become the “expectation that if you are going to compete in the first-person space, you use [anti-cheat]. Especially now that anti-cheat is considered a competitive advantage in Twitch shooters and anywhere where aim matters.”

Having a reliable anti-cheat, then, is what separates the most popular games from others, and boasting a low cheating count is now a selling point for developers.

As you might expect, developer investment in anti-cheat comes from a financial imperative, too. As games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Fortnite continue to generate massive revenue for companies, it’s important to protect that investment. This means keeping players engaged, and as it turns out players don’t want to engage with a game if there are cheaters everywhere.

“One of the things we were able to show, that I think really demonstrated the value of anti-cheat, is that after encountering a cheater and utilizing the report tool to identify that person as a cheater, the likelihood that a player quits triples,” Koskinas says.

“It’s actually worse in the first-person-shooter genre. After encountering a cheater, the likelihood that you stop playing for a week or more is like [five times higher when] compared to a player that hasn’t encountered one. We have a churn.”

The result is that developers like Riot are pouring more and more effort into their anti-cheat solutions – but as anti-cheats become faster and more iterative, so too have the cheats.

“10 years ago, cheats were often distributed by one to three primary providers who would have a large user base of thousands that spent most of the time undetected, and they’d be detected in waves,” Koskinas explains. “But due to how fast anti-cheats these days iterate, the cheating community tends to be comprised of up to a hundred, two hundred, in some scenes, maybe even a thousand different cheats,” Koskinas adds that it’s not just a case of searching for a single code base to detect the many, many cheats, either – some cheats with similar effects may take very different techniques to detect.

The more cheats emerge, the more expensive this all becomes. “The Vanguard team alone is a nightmare to the checkbook,” Koskinas says. First-party anti-cheat teams aren’t developing cosmetics or battle passes that will eventually be sold to players – they’re building tools so that players stick around their games at all.

Where Does It End?

Dice-throwers were cheating 600 years ago, and they’re cheating in games today. A stricter anti-cheat won’t deter some players looking for that extra edge, nor those making money out of them.

“I don’t know if this is statistically the case, but the more people that play, the more people that will ultimately become interested in at least Googling the word cheat,” Koskinas explains. From what the Vanguard team has observed for both League of Legends and Valorant, if a person cheats at least twice, they’ll continue to do so. “If you do it twice, I’ve never seen anyone come back.”

So, as long as cheating remains, anti-cheat in games will only become more important. But there are long-term solutions in the works. One “holy grail” anti-cheat Koskinas spoke about is the ability to distinguish mouse inputs from automated inputs — detecting the difference between humans and AI — through machine learning. But even this will require regular iterations and improvements from a dedicated software team.

You can also focus on protecting, at the very least, the core product. Activision is making sure that one of its most successful titles ever, Call of Duty: Warzone will receive a dedicated anti-cheat, while Epic Games acquired Easy Anti-Cheat after Fortnite became a worldwide hit (it is free for other developers to use). Of course, these are solutions that only the biggest, richest game creators can afford.

For Valorant specifically, Riot’s core focus is its prized ranked mode. “There tends to be a larger investigative effort into people that are higher ranked,” Koskinas says. For the Riot Anti-Cheat team, this means making sure that the top echelons of Ranked mode, defined as the top 20% of Ranked matches, are completely free of cheating.

So far Vanguard’s efforts are paying off. Even though the “variety and the amount of [cheats that are] available are probably at an all-time high,” as far as Valorant is concerned cheaters are at “an all-time low.”

When I congratulated Koskinas on this, Koskinas smiled. “I’d prefer if nobody cheated. A goal without a plan is a dream? I think that’s the phrase.”

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

Original Illustration by Saniya Ahmed.

We now have a clue to why EA Sports is considering changing the name of FIFA, its giant football franchise.

The New York Times reports that there's a dispute between EA, the developer of the FIFA games, and FIFA, the worldwide football organization. The disagreement is reportedly over cost and new revenue streams.

A new report in the @nytimes states that the dispute between EA and FIFA is related to cost and new revenue streams

FIFA wants to charge EA double the amount ($1bn+ every 4 years) for the license and limit EA's ability to monetise beyond the game itselfhttps://t.co/5gNas9Iz9b pic.twitter.com/hZ9YnOZDMN

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) October 13, 2021

According to the report, FIFA wants to charge EA $1 billion every four years to use the FIFA license within its game. Additionally, the organization wants to limit EA's monetization of the game.

FIFA wants to limit EA's moneymaking opportunities to strictly what can be found in the game. EA wants to explore monetizing, "highlights of actual games, arena video game tournaments and digital products like NFTs," the New York Times says.

Last week, EA said they are exploring the idea of renaming the EA Sports football games. EA also says the FIFA partnership is different than their other official partnerships, meaning the loss of FIFA wouldn't mean the loss of official team and player names. The license only gives EA the name, logo, and rights to use the World Cup within the game.

It seems a decision is likely by the end of the year. EA has already trademarked "EA Sports FC", which could end up being the new name of the franchise if EA and FIFA can't come to terms.

We called this year's installment, FIFA 22, "good" in our review, saying, "Microtransactions still loom large, but small iterative changes and the horsepower of new-gen consoles combine to make FIFA 22 feel like a worthwhile upgrade without needing anything revolutionary or terribly exciting from EA’s side."

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

We now have a clue to why EA Sports is considering changing the name of FIFA, its giant football franchise.

The New York Times reports that there's a dispute between EA, the developer of the FIFA games, and FIFA, the worldwide football organization. The disagreement is reportedly over cost and new revenue streams.

A new report in the @nytimes states that the dispute between EA and FIFA is related to cost and new revenue streams

FIFA wants to charge EA double the amount ($1bn+ every 4 years) for the license and limit EA's ability to monetise beyond the game itselfhttps://t.co/5gNas9Iz9b pic.twitter.com/hZ9YnOZDMN

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) October 13, 2021

According to the report, FIFA wants to charge EA $1 billion every four years to use the FIFA license within its game. Additionally, the organization wants to limit EA's monetization of the game.

FIFA wants to limit EA's moneymaking opportunities to strictly what can be found in the game. EA wants to explore monetizing, "highlights of actual games, arena video game tournaments and digital products like NFTs," the New York Times says.

Last week, EA said they are exploring the idea of renaming the EA Sports football games. EA also says the FIFA partnership is different than their other official partnerships, meaning the loss of FIFA wouldn't mean the loss of official team and player names. The license only gives EA the name, logo, and rights to use the World Cup within the game.

It seems a decision is likely by the end of the year. EA has already trademarked "EA Sports FC", which could end up being the new name of the franchise if EA and FIFA can't come to terms.

We called this year's installment, FIFA 22, "good" in our review, saying, "Microtransactions still loom large, but small iterative changes and the horsepower of new-gen consoles combine to make FIFA 22 feel like a worthwhile upgrade without needing anything revolutionary or terribly exciting from EA’s side."

Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

The third season of You is hitting Netflix this Friday. But ahead of the season 3 premiere, the streaming giant announced today that it has renewed the series for a fourth season.

Although Netflix has not shared any information on what fans can expect in season 4, including a release date, Netflix says it will share additional information such as casting at a later date. While season 4 news is minimal currently, we won't have to wait much longer for season 3.

YOU Season 4 is in the [body] bag. pic.twitter.com/cneWinUzUB

— YOU (@YouNetflix) October 13, 2021

You season 3 will focus on the main character Joe Goldberg and Love Quinn, his love interest from season 2, as the duo are now married and adjusting to being parents as they raise their son Henry in the suburbs of California. Although Joe is now a married man, he continues to repeat his old habits of obsession with his next-door neighbor, Natalie.

The series is based on the novel series of the same name by Caroline Kepnes, which currently consists of three books, with a fourth book currently in the works. Though don't expect season 3 to be a direct adaptation of Kepnes' third book, as the show will move in its own direction.

While You became one of Netflix's more popular shows in its library, the series' first season originally aired on Lifetime before Netflix picked up the show in 2018. You's second season premiered back in late December 2019 before Netflix decided to greenlight a third season in January of last year.

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

The third season of You is hitting Netflix this Friday. But ahead of the season 3 premiere, the streaming giant announced today that it has renewed the series for a fourth season.

Although Netflix has not shared any information on what fans can expect in season 4, including a release date, Netflix says it will share additional information such as casting at a later date. While season 4 news is minimal currently, we won't have to wait much longer for season 3.

YOU Season 4 is in the [body] bag. pic.twitter.com/cneWinUzUB

— YOU (@YouNetflix) October 13, 2021

You season 3 will focus on the main character Joe Goldberg and Love Quinn, his love interest from season 2, as the duo are now married and adjusting to being parents as they raise their son Henry in the suburbs of California. Although Joe is now a married man, he continues to repeat his old habits of obsession with his next-door neighbor, Natalie.

The series is based on the novel series of the same name by Caroline Kepnes, which currently consists of three books, with a fourth book currently in the works. Though don't expect season 3 to be a direct adaptation of Kepnes' third book, as the show will move in its own direction.

While You became one of Netflix's more popular shows in its library, the series' first season originally aired on Lifetime before Netflix picked up the show in 2018. You's second season premiered back in late December 2019 before Netflix decided to greenlight a third season in January of last year.

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.