If cheating were possible, someone would cheat. Case in point: just weeks after making the rounds on Twitch, the social deception game Among Us is plagued by cheaters.

There are two ways to cheat in Among Us: the first is to join a public lobby with friends and share information through backchannels. The second is the more traditional video game cheat method: using cheat software, aka "hacking."

The first method relies on the fact that "Among Us" is about discovering or hiding information about the identity of an imposter aboard a spaceship. It would not be interesting if a dead crew member simply told the other living crew members who killed him, only to have the impostor appear from beyond the grave. You can't do that in in-game chat, but if you know each other, it's easy to chat outside the game on the Discord voice channel.

As annoying as it is, the only way to stop it would be to stop people from playing with their friends in public rooms. Perhaps a solo queue playlist could be added.

Even more problematic are mods that give the game host and player direct control over the outcome of the match. One of the mods mentioned in the following tweet allows the host to always be the imposter (the most desired role in the game), and includes an option to turn off kill cooldowns and other evil toggles.

Forest Willard, programmer and business lead for "Among Us," told Kotaku last week that he and developer Innersloth are working on both server- and client-side hacking prevention as well as an account system He said they are working on preventing hacking on both the server and client side as well as the account system.

"It's like we're scrambling to get all the right people in place, but we're attacking from multiple angles, hopefully improving many aspects at once," Willard wrote.

Convincingly, the developers were not entirely prepared for this: Among Us went from having thousands of players at a time to hundreds of thousands in no time. The recent hit "Fall Guys" has a similar problem. This low-stakes battle royale game seems too ridiculous and full of randomness to justify cheating, but that didn't stop cheaters from doing their worst. As a result, developer Mediatonic turned to Epic Games and its Easy Anti-Cheat system for help. This is the same anti-cheat system used in "Fortnite," "Apex Legends," "Halo: The Master Chief Collection," and many other competitive games.

Clearly, the price of owning a successful multiplayer game in 2020 is a scramble for anti-cheat tools, and it does not matter what kind of game it is. It does not matter what kind of game it is. If it is at least a little competitive and popular, cheaters will show up.

Cheaters, on the other hand, continue to be a major problem even in more traditional FPS strongholds. For example, Activision banned 20,000 Call of Duty: Warzone cheaters last week. Prior to this ban wave, many players had expressed frustration that not enough was being done to curb the game's cheating problem.