In the past, a lot of people have been banned from playing in Grand Theft Auto Online for cheating, despite no hack and cheat actions actually took place. Players have been calling out Rockstar for this, branding the detection system as “false positive”. Rockstar doesn’t believe those players, however, as they are challenging people to prove that the system is wrong. The prize money for “successfully recreate a way to trigger an incorrect ban from the system in GTA Online” is $10,000 – about 7 lakh.
According to a related website named HackerOne, this kind of bounty was already created a year ago for just GTA Online, and it has been running for a while since 2016. However, after the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC, Rockstar has decided to expand the program so that it could cover a wider variety of their games and software. The new program will accept bugs and vulnerability reports on a wider scale, in most of their online games, not just GTA online. Currently, the program supports GTA 5/Online, Red Dead 2/Red Dead Online plus its companion app.
It’s not that simple to join this program, however, as you would have to register in Rockstar’s private bounty program prior. There are some fairly strict rules about what to report so you would have to be careful. The minimum bounty for an issue is $150, however, it goes up based on the scale, complexity, and severity of the potential vulnerability. The top researcher on the list has been scoring multiple rewards ranging from $250 to $1k last year.
Many companies are doing this bug bounty program, not just Rockstar. Valve distributed about $840,000 last year for bug reports of Steam and other games made by them such as CSGO, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. Furthermore, the Incorrect Ban Bounty program of GTA Online is still active with the same prize money.
Interested in more articles related to Red Dead 2 and its release on PC? Check out this post for the release trailer.
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