A new study has found that the block-based game Minecraft and the friendship-ending game Among Us are the two most cheater-heavy titles of 2022.

VPN service Surfshark conducted the study titled "Hacking Wins 2022" and published the results on its website. The company gathered data by analyzing cheating-related content on YouTube pertaining to specific games by using keywords such as "How to cheat." These games were then ranked based on the number of views.

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Gaming Cheaters Study

Rules? What Rules?

Surfshark's study concluded that the bestseller title Minecraft came in first place for overall cheaters, with a suspected 30.5 million. This high number essentially blows the rest of the results out of the water, considering that the popular free-to-play title Among Us hosted a distant second place with 16 million cheaters. Other notable titles were present within the top ten, such as Fortnite in third with 12.3 million and Roblox with 10.8 million. Single player games were also included in the data, with Sims 4 in the fifth spot and the heavily-moddable RPG Skyrim taking the tenth spot.

The company also gathered cheating data per country to help further its study. This data was collected by pairing the keyword "cheats" with the five most popular cheater-heavy games alongside a few more other variables. Surfshark's research shows that Iceland is the world's most cheater-dense country, with an estimated 27,704 cheat video views per million internet users. Interestingly enough, most of these views can be traced back to games on the more casual side. The company's data revealed that casual gaming attracts more cheaters than any other genre of video games, with nearly 72 million cheat video views over the five most-cheated games in the genre.

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Minecraft continues to boast a large crowd, with an average of over 170 million players in 2022 alone. However, news of strict, school-like moderation has caused controversy in the last few months, with developer Mojang even going as far as to censor words on privately owned Minecraft servers. Among Us, on the other hand, while second on Surfshark's overall cheaters list, has struggled to maintain a dwindling fanbase. While the game hit a peak of over 774 thousand concurrent viewers on Twitch in November 2020, that number has dropped to a staggeringly low two thousand as of this writing.

Among Us and Minecraft are available to gamers on all major platforms.

Source: Surfshark