Activision Publishing, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against EngineOwning, a company that distributes cheats for Call of Duty and other popular online shooter games, and seeks to terminate the software that allows users to cheat in any game published by Activision.
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“With this lawsuit, Activision seeks to stop the unlawful conduct of an organization that distributes and sells for profit numerous malicious software products designed to allow members to gain unfair competitive advantages (i.e., steal) in COD games,” Activision said. “These ongoing activities harm Activision’s games, its overall business, and the COD player community experience.”
According to the lawsuit, “the cheating software allows players to manipulate COD games for their own personal gain, such as automatically aiming weapons, revealing the location of opponents, and accessing information that is not normally available to players because it would give them an unfair advantage in-game.” The company says it believes the defendants “were fully aware that their conduct violated Activision’s rights, yet they brazenly continued their activities.”
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The company names 50 “Does” in its lawsuit. Activision has recently made several efforts to crack down on cheaters in its Call of Duty games, focusing particularly on its hugely popular and free-to-play game, Call of Duty: Warzone. The company released its new Ricochet anti-cheat system globally in December, and the company said shortly after that it had banned 48,000 “cheat accounts” thanks to the new system. In the lawsuit, Activision says it “was able to identify and ban hundreds of thousands of accounts using cheating software in COD games over the past year.”
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Activision Blizzard is currently embroiled in a scandal following a lawsuit from the state of California, which alleges it encouraged a culture of "perpetuating sexual harassment" and gender discrimination.
