We were surprised to learn in a recent DiamondLobby study that Warzone isn’t the most popular game in any country, despite two other Battle Royale style games — Fortnite and PUBG — being the top choice in around 30 locations across the globe.
A large part of this could be down to the game’s biggest long-term problem: cheaters.
Despite Activision promising to invest more heavily in anti-cheat detection, Warzone still has an undeniable issue with people cheating, or ‘hacking’.
A growing number of accounts are receiving bans on a regular basis but this doesn’t seem to be slowing things down too much — in fact, we’re here to argue that they might well be speeding up.
As they say in the business, when it comes to free games like Warzone, 50,000 banned accounts simply means 50,000 new accounts being created.
We wanted to get a good judge of what the current Warzone hacker situation was like.
To do this, we researched demand for Warzone hacks, aimbots and similar to see if the problem appeared to be improving.
With continual complaints from the community about cheaters, with developers actively trying to address the issue, and with demand for the game decreasing in general, you’d expect that the issue should slowly be going away.
But our research suggests that the cheater problem might only be getting worse as the percentage of cheaters in Warzone increases.
If you’re wondering what percentage of warzone players cheat, continue reading as we explore those details below.
Let’s start by taking a look at how many people have searched online for the phrase ‘Warzone aimbot’ over the last twelve months:
The demand here looks pretty steady, with no significant increase or decrease in demand.
However, it could be argued that less people are interested in Warzone than they were a year ago, and search demand for aimbots should therefore decrease in theory.
With searches remaining at a similar level, it technically means that the percentage of the player base that are looking for cheats could be increasing.
That said, the “aimbot” search query is probably the least interesting of our findings. You can see the live Trends data for this term here.
When it comes to the phrase “Warzone hacks”, things are slightly more clear:
Despite a very recent drop off in popularity for this term — which correlates with a drop in demand for searches for the game and also with a decrease in Warzone streamer viewership — it’s clear that searches for Warzone hacks have been on a gradual long-term rise.
The four highest peaks in the demand for Warzone hacks, according to the Trends data, all happened in 2021, with large spikes happening even as recently as the end of March — way after Activision announced their plans to target hackers more aggressively.
You can see the live Trends data for this term here.
But the most interesting finding (that we can share) is this:
This shows the search demand for a device that allows you to easily adapt controllers and gameplay in certain ways.
We won’t go into further details here but it’s fair to say that most people searching for this device are probably looking to do something in their game that many people would consider cheating.
Note: this isn’t always true and the device can also be used for legitimate reasons.
Some of the mods you can install on this device aren’t as extreme as aimbots or seeing players through walls. This suggests people could be looking for less obvious ways to cheat within Warzone (and other games) as they don’t want to be banned — perhaps not for the first time — or that previously popular cheating software has become less viable due to Activision’s ongoing efforts to clamp down on them.
You can see the live Trends data for this term here.
We also looked up the search volume data for various Call of Duty cheating programs and almost all seem to follow a similar trend; steady demand or a gradual increase in the amount of searches.
We’re refraining from sharing these so not to give publicity to companies that only exist to help people cheat.
With searches for Warzone aimbots remaining steady, searches for Warzone hacks peaking multiple times in 2021, and searches for a device that’s synonymous with cheaters increasing significantly in recent times — and all of this coinciding with less people playing Warzone — we’re confident in saying that more people within Warzone, relative to the overall active player pool, are either looking to cheat or are already cheating.
If you can’t beat them, for heaven’s sake don’t join them.
Which Countries Cheat the Most?
For a fun experiment only, we thought we’d take a look at which countries were searching the most for Warzone hacks, aimbots and the aforementioned adapter.
‘Warzone Aimbot’ search popularity by country:
‘Warzone Hacks’ search popularity by country:
Game adapter search popularity by country:
There are only two countries that show in the top 5 for all three terms: the US and the UK.
Google Trends data is relative, meaning that it takes population size of the country and other things being searched for within each country into account.
