San Francisco, March 13 - During this year’s GDC Festival of Gaming, bringing together thousands of game developers and industry professionals from around the world from March 9–13 at the Moscone Center, Tencent Games Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) debuted its advanced mobile game protection technologies, highlighting a pioneering iOS security architecture and a real-time AI anti-cheat framework tailored for extraction shooter games. Through technical sessions, thought leadership, and the release of a new industry guidebook, ACE reinforced its long-term commitment to building fair, trusted, and sustainable game environments worldwide.

Showcasing Globally Leading Game Security Innovations

At the GameSafe Summit, ACE officially unveiled the industry’s first anti-cracking iOS Hardening Solution to address severe platform-level vulnerabilities. Detailing this structural breakthrough in his session, "Trust, Attest, Server-Authoritative: Modern iOS Anti-Cheat for Multiplayer," Yue Wang dispelled the common industry myth that iOS’s closed ecosystem automatically provides native security. Noting that ACE collected 50 iOS cheat samples across various games in December 2025 alone, Wang demonstrated how, in the face of increasingly sophisticated tampering and bypass techniques, a layered defense approach combining App Attest, enforced HTTPS-like key exchange, Runtime Application Self-Protection, and behavioral validation can significantly strengthen protection. By applying these measures throughout the gameplay lifecycle, ACE establishes a robust security foundation that mitigates risks from modded apps and other tampering methods, effectively addressing the security challenges faced by games on iOS systems.

AI-Powered Anti-Cheat Operations in Extraction Shooter Games, presented by Ray Zhou, highlighted the increasingly complex security challenges in today’s evolving FPS landscape. As extraction shooters have become one of the most popular gameplay formats in recent years, their high-reward in-match and out-of-match economies have introduced security risks that go far beyond direct cheating such as wallhacks and aimbots, extending to coordination-based indirect cheating and broader underground-economy risks.

In the session, Ray Zhou, Senior Engineer at Tencent Games ACE, systematically introduced the security protection framework his team has developed for high-intensity and constantly evolving security confrontation scenarios. To address the complex and multidimensional risks in extraction shooter games, the ACE team has innovatively combined large-scale replay analysis with advanced AI models to build an intelligent anti-cheat solution based on replay data. This solution not only enables precise detection of direct cheating behaviors such as wallhacks and aimbots, but also helps uncover highly covert forms of coordinated indirect cheating. During the session, Ray Zhou also shared the real-world deployment results of these technologies and offered perspectives on the future direction of intelligent game security operations.

Today, this AI-driven approach has already been widely applied in globally popular titles such as Delta Force, Arena Breakout, significantly improving anomaly detection accuracy and operational efficiency. Looking ahead, Ray Zhou noted that ACE is actively exploring deeper match-behavior understanding based on large-model technologies, while also building a security operations workflow system powered by multi-agent collaboration to respond more effectively to constantly evolving security risks.

Driving Trust in Games: ACE Shares Insights from New Global Whitepaper

Building on the momentum from its first global game security whitepaper released in collaboration with TIGG at GDC 2025, ACE unveiled its second comprehensive publication, Designing Trust in Games: Guidebook for Building Fair & Secure Game Ecosystems, at this year's GDC Festival of Gaming. The guidebook examines the evolving trends in the global gaming industry under the influence of AI technologies and highlights the unique challenges this brings to game security. Drawing from ACE’s own operational experience, it provides concrete insights into risk management strategies and practical measures that developers can implement to safeguard their games. By sharing these lessons and frameworks, the whitepaper aims to support game developers worldwide in fostering trusted, resilient, and thriving ecosystems that can adapt to the shifting security landscape and maintain fair play for all players.

Today, ACE provides stable security services for hundreds of games worldwide. Its solutions span mobile, PC, and cross-platform titles, helping developers safeguard competitive integrity, protect player communities, and maintain long-term operational stability.

“ACE has always looked forward to working alongside global game developers to protect fair and secure game environments,” said Xander Li, Product Manager at Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE).“As games continue to evolve technologically and culturally, collaboration across the industry is essential to sustaining trust and ensuring that players everywhere can compete on a level playing field.”

About Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE)

Since 2005, Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) has strived to protect games and players from a broad range of game security threats, offering developers a one-stop game security solution. From basic game protection strategies to industry-leading technologies, ACE offers safeguarding for all games, empowering game developers to preserve the integrity of their game environments. ACE is steadfast in its dedication to partnering with global gaming professionals, contributing to the flourishing of the digital gaming landscape but also to uphold a fair playing field for gamers worldwide.