Really the gaming industry as a whole should get on Microsoft's back about this. Windows as a gaming platform is still big business, but it's going to be dead in the water if something definitive can't be done about the hacks.
And I think Microsoft would be well positioned to come up with some pretty definitive fixes. Really, the means of hacking are things provided intentionally by the operating system as a means of debugging. Hacking isn't really that clever when you realize the tools for it are there on purpose. Microsoft giveth, and Microsoft can taketh away. Programs could be run inside protected, virtual machines. Memory protection could exist at the hardware level. A squad of people could hunt down the handful of people who actually create these hacks, give them cement galoshes and push them overboard into the English Channel, Osama Bin Laden style, and their mothers would never find out how their dear, 28 year old college dropout vanished from the basement. I'm just brainstorming. I'm sure there's a solution that would work.
After RealTime Worlds got put into bankruptcy because of videogame hacks, with millions of dollars lost and actual people losing actual jobs as a result, you'd think maybe the game makers of the world would realize it's no longer a little side issue that they can laugh off.
Now it's costing jobs and money.
Cement galoshes. I'm just sayin'.
