Cheating has never been just a nuisance. When an aimbot user clears a competitive lobby, a gold-farming network drains an in-game economy, or a cracked build siphons away revenue, the damage lands in the same place: player trust. And once trust erodes, retention, monetization and a title's long-term community collapse with it. For studios operating live-service titles across mobile and PC, security is no longer a feature to bolt on at launch — it is part of the product itself.

This is the challenge Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) has spent over two decades solving. Born within Tencent Games in 2005 and now serving developers around the world, ACE has evolved from an internal anti-bot team into a next-generation, one-stop game defense ecosystem. Spanning mobile and PC, covering every major genre, and backed by one of the industry's largest threat-intelligence networks. ACE's mission remains constant: empower developers to focus on building great experiences while keeping the playing field fair.

Why Game Security is Getting Harder

The threat landscape has shifted decisively. Cheats have advanced beyond simple client-side memory edits to hardware-based attacks, such as Direct Memory Access (DMA) cards that traditional software struggles to detect. Meanwhile, cheat development has industrialized into a subscription economy, complete with dedicated customer support and rapid update cycles. Most critically, artificial intelligence has become a double-edged force multiplier—powering visual aimbots that bypass game processes entirely, automating bot farming at scale, and lowering the barrier to entry for prospective cheaters.
Simultaneously, games have gone global. A worldwide launch must defend against cheat distribution across a dozen languages, comply with stringent regional data-privacy regulations, and maintain uptime across all time zones. Point solutions are no longer sufficient. Developers require a layered, dynamic defense that evolves as fast as the threat landscape—the exact design philosophy behind ACE.

A One-Stop Defense Ecosystem

ACE approaches game security as a system rather than a single standalone tool. Its capabilities span four interconnected pillars, allowing studios to adopt as much or as little protection as their game requires.

Mobile Protection: Three Tiered Defense Levels

Mobile development presents a unique intersection of scale, device fragmentation, and rooted-environment risks. ACE addresses this with three protection tiers tailored to specific genres and threat levels:

ACE-LITE (Game Hardening): Focuses on source protection. It encrypts binaries, metadata, and resource files to resist decompilation, blocks dynamic analysis tools like IDA and Frida, and prevents cracked or modded builds via signature and integrity checks.

ACE-Basic (Client Anti-Cheat): Adds active client-side defenses—blocking game modifiers and speed hacks, flagging compromised environments (such as app containers, emulators, rooted devices, cloud phones, and jailbroken iOS), detecting cheat apps directly on Android, and stopping automated farming scripts.

ACE-STD (Server-Side Synergy): Designed for high-stakes titles, extending protection to the server side. By deploying over twenty server-based anti-cheat strategies, it ensures that even a compromised client cannot bypass detection. Its server-validated Cheat Detection API delivers actionable, high-confidence data for fair and precise sanctions—enabling privacy-sensitive markets to enforce security without invasive client permissions.

PC Defense: Layered and Genre-Aware

PC remains the most complex battleground, particularly for competitive FPS titles. ACE pairs robust baseline protection with genre-specific defenses:

Client Hardening: Prevents games from running within virtual machines or multi-instance setups, guards against malicious code injection and frame-capture tools, and encrypts code/metadata to impede reverse engineering.

Signature & Dynamic Detection: A dual-engine system operating across user and driver modes, combining static sample analysis with real-time dynamic detection via ACE SkyEye.

Advanced Competitor Protections: Opt-in features including hardware-based bans, DMA hardware countermeasures, AI-driven cheat mitigation, and dedicated FPS defenses against wallhacks, aimbots, and macro abuses. This layer draws on two decades of combat experience across global esports titles like Delta Force, VALORANT (China region), PUBG MOBILE, and Call of Duty: Mobile.

Protecting In-Game Economies

Cheating is increasingly financial. Gold-farming operations and grey-market trading quietly ruin game economies and drain developer margins. ACE deploys deep-learning AI models to neutralize these networks by analyzing behavioral logs, process scans, and transaction patterns. Real-time transaction monitoring offers studios full visibility into illicit trade volumes, economic health, and grey-market supply chains.

Intelligence as the Strategic Moat

Threat intelligence serves as the foundation of ACE’s ecosystem. Powered by a global network of over 100 intelligence channels, ACE has indexed over 150,000 cheat samples across hundreds of titles, actively tracking distribution in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Spanish. By monitoring illicit distribution channels directly, ACE delivers early-warning alerts to partners before cheats achieve critical scale—shifting game defense from reactive patching to proactive disruption.

Two Decades of Frontline Evolution

ACE's credibility comes from the fact that its capabilities were forged in live combat, not in a lab. It began in 2005 as an anti-cheat group providing basic anti-bot services for QQ Fantasy, then expanded through 2011 to major titles like CrossFire and Dungeon & Fighter (DNF) in China.

Between 2013 and 2015 it moved into mobile security, protecting titles such as Honor of Kings. From 2017 to 2019 it applied its solutions to Call of Duty: Mobile, achieving key breakthroughs in FPS protection against wallhacks, aimbots and mouse macros, and co-founded the Fair Play Alliance (now TIGG).

The last few years mark ACE's turn outward to the global stage. It formally rebranded to Anti-Cheat Expert between 2021 and 2024, debuted at Gamescom and GDC, and formed partnerships with developers worldwide, extending its protection to globally recognized competitive titles such as Delta Force, VALORANT (China) and PUBG MOBILE.

In 2025 it released the industry's first Global Guide to Game Protection, and in 2026 it launched the industry's first anti-cracking iOS Hardening Solution and published the Guidebook for Building Fair & Secure Game Ecosystems — a reflection of how ACE increasingly sees its role not just as a vendor, but as a contributor to the standards and shared practices the whole industry can build on.

Trusted by Developers Worldwide

Today, ACE partners with leading international publishers and studios—including Netmarble, FUNPLUS, KURO GAME, Aiming, and Oneway Ticket Studio—spanning competitive shooters, long-standing MMORPGs, and mobile hits. These partnerships reflect a shared industry consensus: fair play is a primary driver of player retention, and securing it requires a partner tested at true global scale.
By letting ACE handle the evolving threat landscape, studios can stay focused on what matters most: delivering unforgettable gaming experiences.

Game on, cheats gone.

To learn more or book a demo, visit the official ACE website at https://intl.anticheatexpert.com/ or get in touch with the product team.