I would think money plays a big role too. Back when Apex Legends exploded into the scene with the initial user base, selling a hack for 10 a pop would make a lot of money.

I recently met someone who claimed he had a three person company making cheats. Maybe one of them was solely marketing? The memory blurs. They were selling cheats as a subscription service and with different tiers unlocking more cheats. Earned a decent salary doing it.

Is this legal? It's obviously against TOS, but I don't think breaking a TOS is illegal..

You could make a case that making a cheat is copyright infringement as Blizzard did [0] so yes, it can be illegal.

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/blizzard-sues-overwatch-cheat-maker...

It seems like blizzard is really stretching and the cases that already went to court they lost.

Is making an overlay a derivative work?

I see a weird side of it since I'm a big fan of a hong kong pubg game called hopelessland oUT of hon kong. Great game, huge amount of hackers. I looked into it, and on the android side of things, it looks like their is one major community that opens up apks and gives them away for free. I'm sure their is a business model. But that game, is fun, runs on a low spec device and has a global base. But not as horribly hacked as it was. I would love to know if they even spun up the binary save file in unity or if their are millions of kids with the same laptop I have in 3rd world countries. A 64 core duo with 4 gigs of ram, or if they have my other laptop, which is 32 bit.

There's a monetary incentive as well. If you can reliably produce new cheats that aren't detectable, people will buy them. There's usually an incentive not to share private cheats because once it's public, it will still probably work but will definitely get you banned. Amateurs and professionals both pay for private cheats so besides the technical challenge, there is some money to be made.