Valve really doesn’t like cheaters, and the company is working on an artificial intelligence to combat them head on.
In a Reddit post, Valve confirmed that it has started work on an AI that is learning the difference between cheaters and highly skilled players. The AI has already started reporting bad eggs.
On the Global Offensive Subreddit, users posited why Valve had not created some kind of safeguard against cheaters who use spinbots. Valve actually chimed in to explain the difficulty in dealing with hackers.
“Any hard-coded detection of spin-botting leads to an arms race with cheat developers — if they can find the edges of the heuristic you’re using to detect the cheat, the problem comes back,” replied Valve_Anti-Cheat on Reddit.
A spinbot is a type of hack that spins a character so fast that it gives a 360 degree field of view. Because the player looks like they’re glitching, it also makes them a difficult target to hit. Couple this with aiming software and cheaters can essentially hit any player from any angle. It also makes spectating Counter-Strike pretty annoying too.
Unfortunately, catching these hackers is not so easy, as an AI has to evaluate each player. Multiply that by the over one-million matches that take place every day, and the system would quickly fall behind. Valve would essentially need to create a datacenter powering thousands of CPU cores just to catch cheaters.
Luckily, Valve does have an early version of a system already running and deployed. It’s monitoring games and submitting cases to Overwatch (not the game), Valve’s community group that looks at reports of disruptive behavior. If Valve’s new AI starts sending consistent and accurate reports, then Overwatch can start temporarily or permanently banning cheaters.
Unfortunately, until this AI is fully operational, cheaters will continue to ruin it for everybody else.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.