Embark Studios Banned 15,000 Players in One Day, But Dev Says They “Need Thousands of Developers” to Keep Up with the $8 Billion Cheat Industry

Cheating remains one of the biggest challenges facing multiplayer games, and Embark Studios says the scale of the fight has grown far beyond simply detecting suspicious software. Speaking at Gamescom Dev 2026, senior software engineer Tom van Dijck revealed that the studio banned around 15,000 players on Monday alone while discussing its ongoing efforts against cheaters in ARC Raiders and THE FINALS. According to van Dijck, the studio is facing an estimated $8 billion cheat industry that operates like a commercial business and continually develops new ways to bypass security systems.

The Gamescom Dev session, titled “Anti Cheat at Embark Studios,” focused on the studio’s past, present, and future approach to protecting its multiplayer games. The official Gamescom Dev listing confirms that the presentation examined the difficulties, successes, and evolving challenges surrounding anti-cheat development.

Embark Says Cheating Is an Industry, Not a Problem With One Fix

Van Dijck explained that Embark’s anti-cheat team is fighting an opponent with significantly more resources and a strong financial incentive to keep evolving.

“We’re just a small team, and even if we weren’t, we’re up against an $8 billion industry. It’s operated like a commercial industry. How do you fight an industry that’s operated like a full business?”

The developer also stressed that there is no single solution capable of permanently eliminating cheating. Hardware-based tools, AI-assisted cheats, memory manipulation, exploits, and other techniques can appear as developers shut down older methods. As van Dijck put it, the studio cannot simply win a traditional cat-and-mouse game by responding to every new cheat individually.

“We can’t keep up with the cat and mouse game, because we’d need thousands of developers to counter the cheats.”

That challenge has led the studio to place greater emphasis on data rather than relying solely on traditional anti-cheat software. According to the information shared during the Gamescom Dev talk, the studio can capture up to 20 billion daily events across THE FINALS and ARC Raiders, including player inputs, mouse movements, clicks, recoil behavior, crosshair movement, and unusual interactions with the game world.

15,000 Bans Show the Scale of Embark’s Anti-Cheat Efforts

The massive amount of telemetry collected by Embark allows its systems to examine suspicious patterns across individual matches. Van Dijck explained that most of this information is simply normal gameplay data, but it can also contain signals that help the team identify behavior inconsistent with legitimate play.

The studio can reportedly use its internal tools to reconstruct player activity and investigate details ranging from recoil patterns to how a player moves through the environment. The goal is not only to find obvious cheats but also to distinguish genuinely suspicious behavior from legitimate software that could appear unusual to an automated system.

Van Dijck noted that the process remains difficult because programs such as OBS, Steam, and Overwolf can complicate cheat detection. The studio’s own ban and enforcement policy Embark Support also warns that external software interacting with the game may trigger anti-cheat concerns, which makes accurate detection essential.

Van Dijck added that around 15,000 players were banned on Monday, including bans issued while the session was taking place. The number highlights the scale of the enforcement operation but also the difficulty of the studio’s broader mission.

Why Embark Is Moving Beyond Traditional Anti-Cheat Solutions

Van Dijck argued that simply integrating a third-party anti-cheat product is not enough for a competitive multiplayer FPS.

“If you’re making any kind of FPS and thinking about buying a product and integrating it, you’re not going to make it.”

The developer said kernel-level anti-cheat remains controversial because of its invasive nature, but he described it as a “necessary evil” in the current environment. Embark has also been expanding its anti-cheat ecosystem rather than depending on a single detection method.

The Gamescom Dev presentation suggests that the studio views anti-cheat as a continuing live-service challenge rather than a feature that can be completed and left unchanged. With cheat developers increasingly using new hardware, AI-assisted tools, and techniques designed to avoid conventional detection, the studio’s answer appears to be a multi-layered system built around enforcement, telemetry, analysis, and ongoing adaptation.

For players of ARC Raiders and THE FINALS, the fight against cheaters may never completely disappear. However, Embark’s decision to reveal that it banned 15,000 players in a single day shows the scale of the systems now operating behind the scenes and how seriously the studio views a problem that could directly affect the long-term health of both games.