Sunday, May 4, 2025

Image Credits: Riot Games/YouTube

As video games have become more competitive and professionalized, there's more pressure on developers to beef up their anti-cheating efforts. Among the most notable tools: Vanguard, a kernel-level anti-cheat system developed by Riot Games.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai spoke to Riot's head of anti-cheat Phillip Koskinas about how the company can make cheat developers "look like fools." And while Koskinas describes himself as someone who was "put on this earth for the one singular purpose of banning cheaters from online video games," he also acknowledged that his team actually allows a little bit of cheating, within reason.

"To keep cheating dumb, we ban slower," he said.

Keep reading to see what else TechCrunch is covering this weekend.

Weekend news and opinion

Image Credits: Spotify

Backstage with Spotify's dev tools: Backstage is, in fact, an open source project developed by Spotify — think of it as the company's music-free side hustle. In an interview, Spotify's head of technology and platforms, Tyson Singer, explained why the tool has been adopted by developers at 3,400 organizations, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines.

Etsy and eBay try to sound confident in the face of tariffs: In their latest earnings reports, executives at both e-commerce companies tried to downplay tariff concerns. For example, Etsy's CFO said the company's "direct tariff exposure appears to be relatively low."

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What else we're reading 📗

In his Spyglass newsletter, M.G. Siegler examines this week's big court ruling against Apple, using an extended "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" metaphor to explain how Tim Cook chose poorly — and argue that the Apple CEO can now make a better choice by cutting App Store fees and opening up web distribution for apps.

Also, Stratechery's Ben Thompson speaks to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who claims that chatbots are needed because "the average American has fewer than three friends." (He was probably referring to this Pew survey on close friendships.)