Highlights

  • Bungie has won a major lawsuit against AimJunkies for selling cheats, with a jury finding that cheats are a copyright violation.
  • The jury awarded Bungie $63,210, the revenue earned by AimJunkies from selling Destiny 2 cheats.

Bungie has won a major lawsuit against AimJunkies, marking another warning for Destiny 2 cheat sellers. The video game maker sued the four men behind the website, who it argued were harming the Destiny 2 player base by selling cheats. Not only had the Washington-based studio received thousands of complaints from gamers about cheaters, but Bungie had also doled out millions of dollars in anti-cheat strategies.

Bungie first filed suit against AimJunkies in 2021, with the developer claiming copyright and trademark infringement. The cheat site argued that its software was a result of its own work and therefore didn’t infringe on Bungie’s rights. Some of the game studio’s claims were dismissed in April 2022, with the judge stating that Bungie had failed to prove copyright violations. Other claims were sent to arbitration, and the Destiny 2 developer was reportedly awarded $4.3 million in damages and other costs in February 2023.

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The game developer wasn’t done there, however. Bungie also filed suit for the revenue AimJunkies had earned selling its Destiny 2 cheats, and the case went before a jury on May 20, 2024. After a few days, the jury awarded Bungie $63,210, with the four named defendants owing around $11,000 each and AimJunkies’ co-founding company, Phoenix Digital, owing an additional $20,000.

Bungie's Win in the Destiny 2 Cheat Sellers Lawsuit Is Potentially Significant

The verdict in this Destiny 2 lawsuit is significant in part because, as Stephen Totilo points out, it marks one of the first instances of a game cheat case going before a jury. It also means that a jury has decided that video game hacks and cheats like those sold by AimJunkies are copyright violations, a stance that has been debated by developers and cheat sellers for years now. Phoenix Digital/AimJunkies, for its part, states that it will be requesting that the jury’s decision be dismissed and, barring that, an appeal will be filed.

This, of course, is not the only time that Bungie has taken on cheat sellers. In 2021, the company co-filed a suit with Ubisoft against cheat maker Ring-1, which was settled out of court in 2022 for $300,000. Just a year ago, in May 2023, Bungie won lawsuits against two Destiny 2 cheat sellers, Kunal Bansal of LaviCheats and Mihai Claudiu-Florentin of VeteranCheats. Bungie was awarded $6.7 million in damages and fees for the former case and $12 million for the latter.