About
How We Came Here
BattlEye (BE) was founded by Bastian Suter in October 2004. Starting out as an external 3rd-party anti-cheat for Battlefield Vietnam, first versions were quickly released and it rapidly gained first acknowledgement. In early 2005, it was integrated in the first professional leagues. Due to request by the community, BattlEye was then ported to Battlefield 1942 and again used by some leagues.
The breakthrough came a few months later, when BattlEye was newly developed for the highly anticipated Battlefield 2. After its release in June 2005, the demand for BattlEye from a huge and active community grew more and more and it soon was integrated in many leagues (including all large German ones). From time to time, many server admins decided to protect their public servers with the system as well.
In 2006, BattlEye was directly integrated into a game, called Warsow – a popular freeware FPS, with official support from the developers for the first time. It now ran internally in the game, allowing a far better detection of cheats/hacks than with the external solution for the Battlefield series before. Support for the popular indie title Soldat then came in the same way.
In 2007 and 2008, BattlEye was integrated into the successful commercial multiplayer games ArmA: Armed Assault / Combat Operations and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, marking a new huge milestone. Support for critically acclaimed ArmA 2 and its standalone extension ArmA 2: Operation Arrowhead followed in 2009 and 2010, setting the stage for BattlEye protecting the hugely popular DayZ mod being released in 2012. In the same year it was also integrated into the WWII game Iron Front: Liberation 1944.
Finally, in 2013 BattlEye was added to the biggest Arma-series game to date, Arma 3, and the well-known DayZ standalone game. Fighting cheaters in all games with success, at some point it was obvious that BattlEye had the potential to be more than a traditional anti-cheat that only kicks or bans players after the damage has already been done. Consequently, BattlEye transformed into a proactive system in late 2014 completely preventing most cheating from happening. This marked the biggest milestone so far.
The cheater-plagued DayZ community has confirmed many times that cheating has been reduced to an absolute minimum ever since the new proactive system was introduced in February 2015. Mission: Success! Being passionate about protecting games for almost 11 years, we are looking forward to assisting game developers in their fight against selfish cheaters for many decades to come.
To be continued…
How Does It All Work?
To ensure that you can focus on the important parts of game development without having to directly deal with cheating yourself, we made sure that BattlEye is very easy to integrate into any game, making it ready for release within days. BattlEye has no special system requirements: Being very user-friendly, BE needs only little resources regarding CPU, RAM and network bandwidth. The player simply will not notice that BattlEye is running in the background. Integration happens on the server- and client-side part of the game, ensuring that cheaters can be effectively removed from any game session. BattlEye is distributed together with the other game files, so a manual download from our website is generally not required.
BattlEye at its core is a proactive protection system which puts a strong shield around the entire game. That way most hacking is completely blocked to begin with. This system is constantly evolving to cover new forms of attacking games. The remaining hacking is covered by an intelligent dynamic on-the-fly detection system, ensuring that unrelenting cheaters are globally banned quickly. BattlEye thereby does its entire job independently without requiring any input from the developer’s side.
To get a little more technical, here are some details on how BattlEye works on the inside:
- Fully fledged proactive protection system completely blocking the vast amount of hacking and going further than most other solutions without bothering the player
- Fast dynamic and permanent scanning of the player’s system in user- and kernel-mode using innovative, sophisticated specific and heuristic/generic detection and cheat analysis routines for maximum effectivenes
- Secure (unfakeable) global banning system that can be SteamID/account-based and hence provides the same or an even higher level of effectiveness as/than e.g. VAC bans, because (unlike with VAC) Steam-global bans are possible (performance: over 150,000 bans in 15 months in ArmA 2: Operation Arrowhead)
- The BE Server is keeping full control over the game server, enforcing quick and constant responses from all BE Clients and instantly kicking violating players
- Communication happens via highly encrypted packets through the game’s own network connection, not requiring any additional port/firewall forwarding
- Secure auto-update system, working very reliably and bandwidth-friendly without disturbing the player
- Fully customized solutions as needed for every game it supports, e.g. a very effective script detection in the ArmA series
Of course, everything we do is always aimed at keeping games free of cheaters and we are not interested in any personal information of our users. We never have and never will collect or store information that is unrelated to the game or hack-detecting mechanisms.
To get a good idea of what BattlEye is all about we also recommend watching the following elaborate GDC presentation from DayZ’s Eugen Harton, detailing how Bohemia Interactive battles hacking using BattlEye:
Who We Work With
“BattlEye has proven to be an exceptional ally to help us fight cheating on Rainbow Six! The necessary efforts for the initial implementation were minimal and it showed us from the start very good results. The active protection helped weeding out small hacks while the passive protection wined us the battle against commercial cheats. With more than 10000 issued bans so far, BattlEye is one of the best investment Rainbow Six made tech wise in 2016.” – Jalal El Mansouri, Technical Architect, Ubisoft Montreal (January 2017)
We are supporting many great game developers and are always looking for new partnerships. Here are some of those we already work with:
Interested?
If you are a game developer or publisher interested in the integration of BattlEye into your online multiplayer game, please feel free to get in contact and send an email to license[at]battleye.com or use the CONTACT FORM to get more information. We gladly offer risk-free demonstrations to make sure you can convince yourself that BattlEye is the right solution for you.