This presentation from Valve on VACNet touches on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc Specfiically, a

This presentation from Valve on VACNet touches on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc Specfiically, at about 7:50 into this, he talks about the propensity of encountering cheaters in CS:GO. The tl;dr is that in a 5v5 multiplayer game the percentage of cheaters required to ruin 9 other players' games at once is not high. It only takes 7% of people to cheater to encounter 1 every 2nd game, and a 2% cheating rate gets you a 20% cheater-encounter rate. I'd also touch on the point that cheating ruins an online-only game. Like, it is the #1 way a game falls apart. Take a look at a game like Escape from Tarkov, where a cheater will ruin a good block of time for a lot of people just by existing in one game. It's especially bad in that game because the distinction between 'being caught by someone in a position you didn't check' and 'being killed by a cheater' is so unclear, and the consequences of losing are so high (and thus losing to a cheater is so much worse). It creates an environment where the players have to be absolutely 100% confident cheating doesn't exist, or it will very quickly sour people to the game.