Bungie wins multi-million lawsuit against cheat seller

Bungie has been cracking down on cheat sellers for a while now. The company has recently won a lawsuit worth millions of dollars against a Destiny 2 cheat seller and followed up with yet another lawsuit.

Bungie’s commitment to tracking cheat vendors is important to ensure Destiny 2’s future. Free-to-play games are often a target for cheaters, so the company must remain vigilant to ensure they keep cheaters to a minimum or they risk losing players.

Bungie Gets $4.3M After Winning Lawsuit

Bungie’s lawsuit against Destiny 2 cheaters has proved successful after months of back and forth: the original Halo developers are now getting $4.3 million.

Phoenix Digital and AimJunkies originally faced copyright infringement after developing and selling cheats for Destiny 2, but their attempts to address it have come to nothing. Bungie’s victory was celebrated via the Destiny Bulletin Twitter account on February 21, 2023. The original lawsuit alleged that AimJunkies and other cheat designers violated Bungie’s license agreement by creating cheats without permission.

The lawsuit read: 

“Defendants violate Bungie’s copyrights and trademarks, circumvent technical measures protecting access to Destiny 2, and violate and induce other players to break Bungie’s limited software license agreement.”

Prior to their victory, Destiny 2 developers faced a counterclaim from AimJunkies and Phoenix Digital. The cheat developers claimed that Bungie accessed their PCs without permission, which ironically was a similar rationale for the game developer’s original lawsuit. The counterclaim was based on Bungie’s (then) new Terms of Service. The previous agreement didn’t allow the developers to access the PCs of suspected hackers, while the new agreement does now.

Bungie allegedly had access to the PCs of an alleged third-party cheats developer, James May, and the three executive members of Phoenix Digital. However, that argument failed in court and Bungie got the money.

Bungie is suing cheat developers for $6.7 million

Bungie wants to take even tougher action against cheat distributors and developers before the release of Lightfall. The Destiny 2 developer plans to sue a new cheat distributor for $6.7 million.

Bungie is currently trying to sue cheat vendor LaviCheats, stating that they want at least $2000 for each download of these cheats. The cheat was downloaded 2,790 times and, along with other damages, resulted in a $6.7 million lawsuit.

Bungie itself said in the lawsuit that they are seeking a “substantial sum of damages” because without it, Bansal aka LeviCheats “would probably not be able to stop its wrongful activities.” Bansal responded to the post on their forums with: “Bungie Lawyers, fuck me!”

Two years ago, Bungie sued cheat provider Elite Boss Tech for $13.5 million.