Mobile gaming is an enormous market in the 2020s, worth upwards of 63 billion USD. With so much on the line, it’s only natural that significant attention goes to improving security. From keeping games fair and stable to protecting the end-user from the theft of personal or financial information, game security is enormous and only growing more so.

Evolving considerably over the last few years, we want to look at the different avenues and components which make up modern mobile gaming safety. From payment systems to the devices themselves, here’s why most users will never have to worry.

Payment Security

The largest concern for many mobile players comes from how their wallet is attached to their online accounts. Waking up to see a series of zeros where your account balance used to be is a nightmare come to life, and this is something digital security agencies understand well. It’s also an area that can be difficult to address, as financial services operate independently of the gaming sphere.

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Casino games are a common example here, where deposits and withdrawals could act as areas of continued vulnerability. Addressing these problems can be simple, however, by adopting secure systems as does Genesis Casino with Paysafecard. Easy to use, these third-party systems include features like two-factor authentication to essentially eliminate any risks of foul-play.

Mobile Operating Systems

In larger terms, device security is handled by mobile operating systems like iOS or Android. These are tied deeply into the hardware, and work to prevent any unauthorized access from sneaky programs acting as they shouldn’t. Security systems on this level are fighting constantly, though you might not have even noticed.

One of the biggest examples of this is how Apple and Android devices push users to stick to their specific app stores. As CNBC covers, this ensures a tested and verified ecosystem that can vastly mitigate threats. You might have also noticed this in how some apps are only allowed to be installed on internal storage, which can help confine them to certain types of memory.

Anti-Hacking Software

Inside of the games, it’s up to the developers to implement some form of anti-cheating and anti-hacking software. These will vary highly by title but usually tie into verifying game data against stored online records. Otherwise, hacking within games can become so advanced that more creative methods are required.

This was the idea adopted by Tencent, which as Forbes notes, they implemented into PUBG. Here, players can directly spectate others after a game is over, making it easy to find and report cheaters, that their accounts are rapidly banned.

Security in mobile gaming is like anywhere else, in that it’s a constant battle being waged back and forth. Sometimes, as with payment methods, this battle is one-sided. Other times, as with the risk of cheating within a game, there is a lot more give and take. With that said, the amount of resources it takes for individual hackers to keep up is rapidly approaching untenable levels. While it might take a few years yet, we can expect all forms of mobile gaming to become safer the further into the future we go.