If there’s one universal truth in the modern landscape of competitive multiplayer gaming, it’s that cheating has become an absolute, unmitigated nightmare. Whether you’re trying to survive the grueling raids of Escape from Tarkov or just looking to secure a battle royale victory in Call of Duty: Warzone, you are inevitably going to cross paths with someone tracking you through walls or snapping onto your head with impossible precision.
Players are exhausted. Developers are playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. And Felix “xQc” Lengyel, one of the biggest and most notoriously outspoken streamers on the internet, has absolutely had enough. In a recent broadcast on Kick, the streamer completely lost his cool over the state of modern shooters, suggesting a punishment for cheat developers and users that is, to put it lightly, a bit extreme.
A Boiling Point For Shooters
To understand xQc’s frustration, you have to look at the current state of the games he’s talking about. Warzone has been plagued by sophisticated hacking suites for years, prompting Activision to roll out its invasive kernel-level Ricochet anti-cheat. Meanwhile, Escape from Tarkov recently went through a massive community crisis highlighted by a viral YouTube documentary that exposed just how rampant “wiggling” (a method cheaters use to identify other cheaters through walls) had become.
It’s not just a minor annoyance anymore; it’s a lucrative underground industry. Cheat developers are making millions of dollars selling monthly subscriptions for aimbots, ESP (Extra Sensory Perception), and hardware spoofers. For hardcore streamers who play these games for a living, encountering a hacker isn’t just a frustrating end to a match—it’s an active disruption of their job.
Enter xQc, who has never been known to mince words.
Sweatshops And Jail Time
During a recent Kick stream, a conversation about the state of competitive gaming prompted xQc to unleash a blistering tirade against the people who code and purchase these illicit tools.
In a clip that quickly skyrocketed to the top of the popular r/LivestreamFail subreddit, the streamer didn’t hold back. Speaking with his trademark rapid-fire delivery, xQc declared that the people responsible for the cheating epidemic shouldn’t just be banned from the servers—they should be facing severe real-world legal consequences.
“They should be put in jail and forced to work on sweatshops,” xQc ranted to his thousands of viewers. He went on to emphasize the sheer scale of the damage these individuals do to the gaming ecosystem, adding, “they have ruined games like Tarkov and Warzone.”
While xQc is prone to hyperbole, his visceral anger struck a chord. The Reddit thread covering the clip was immediately flooded with gamers echoing his sentiment. Even if shipping teenage wallhackers off to overseas labor camps is an obviously absurd and legally impossible fantasy, the underlying anger is something almost every PC gamer can relate to right now.
The Bigger Picture
As unhinged as xQc’s “sweatshop” comment is, the gaming industry actually is moving closer to his secondary demand: real legal consequences.
Over the last few years, major publishers have stopped relying solely on in-game ban waves and have started taking the fight directly to the courtroom. Bungie, the studio behind Destiny 2, recently won massive multi-million dollar lawsuits against prominent cheat distributors. Activision has similarly hunted down the creators of Call of Duty cheat suites, forcing them offline under the threat of crippling litigation.
But lawsuits take time, and for the average player booting up a match on a Friday night, the legal victories feel distant compared to the immediate sting of getting sniped through a concrete wall. Cheat makers simply rebrand, rewrite their code, and pop back up under a different name.
xQc’s explosive rant is ultimately a symptom of a much larger disease infecting the shooter genre. Players are tired of investing their time, energy, and money into games that are fundamentally broken by bad actors looking for a shortcut. Until developers can find a permanent fix—if a permanent fix even exists—we can probably expect a lot more streamers to echo xQc’s rage. Hopefully, though, we can leave the sweatshops out of it.