Cheating in esports is best understood as an organizational risk problem with three moving parts: incentives, opportunities, and enforceable consequences. On the incentive side, actors cheat either to secure competitive outcomes (status, contracts, qualification, prize money) or to manipulate outcomes for external gain (most often wagering-related), so a good integrity program treats “win-driven” and “lose-driven” cheating as different species with different tells and controls. On the opportunity side, modern esports creates multiple attack surfaces: the game client and peripherals (software assistance, macros, hardware), the online environment (connection disruption and other interference), and the event/ops layer (admins, tech setups, access control), meaning prevention cannot live only in anti-cheat software; it has to include tournament operations, identity and device controls, and clear escalation paths when something smells off. Finally, consequences are the organization’s strongest lever: consistent rules, fast investigations, proportionate sanctions, and transparent deterrence messaging make the expected cost of cheating higher than the expected benefit. Put together, an org-level “cheating risk” overview becomes a governance loop: define behaviors and thresholds, instrument monitoring and reporting, reduce opportunities through technical and operational controls, investigate with a repeatable process, and enforce outcomes consistently across partners so the ecosystem doesn’t become a patchwork of loopholes.

The original ESIC Esports Threat Assessment (attached) was carried out in 2015 and formed the basis on which ESIC was formally founded in 2016, and, whilst a few aspects of esports governance have changed and matured, the fundamentals of the Analysis remain valid and applicable to the esports ecosystem.