Ubisoft Acquires GameBlocks to Help Spot Cheats in Online Games

(Photo: Ubisoft)

Nobody likes a cheat, and none more so than game developers and publishers who manage online games. Ubisoft is one of the biggest, and it just acquired GameBlocks through its subsidiary i3D.net to make spotting online cheats easier and faster.

GameBlocks has been around since 2012, and it specializes in both anti-cheat technology and performance monitoring. Its anti-cheat system is called Fairfight, and it works on the server side so players don’t need to install any software. Fairfight operates in real time and uses a proprietary GameChanger rule engine to “evaluate players gameplay actions to make the game fair for everyone.” It’s already used in popular titles such as the Battlefield series, Star Wars Battlefront games, Titanfall, The Division, and Rainbow Six Siege.

Now that GameBlocks is a part of Ubisoft, the technology is being deployed to the company’s i3D.net high-performance, low-latency global network, and more specifically, the One Game Hosting Platform, which is described as “a unique ecosystem utilized by AAA game publishers and hosts over 300 million users. It allows access to compute and network capacity in over 40 edge locations worldwide.” So the anti-cheat system is going to help protect many more games than just those produced by Ubisoft’s own studios.

“My entire team and I are thrilled to be joining i3D.net and the Ubisoft family,” said GameBlocks CEO Greg Howard. “We will continue to support our existing clients and look forward to enhancing the capabilities of Fairfight so that it remains the most flexible, effective and transparent cheat detection service in the industry. We are also excited to incorporate the Fairfight system into i3D.net’s ONE Game Hosting Platform—allowing game publishers large and small to run and scale their game hosting, anti-cheat and other services absolutely seamlessly.”

For players, there should be no difference to the experience they have playing games through Ubisoft’s hosting platform. However, anyone caught cheating in a game will probably find themselves quickly reprimanded and ultimately ejected if they continue to break the rules.