AccelByte Blog: Insights on Game Development & Backend

We Built an Open-Source Way to Connect Epic Online Services Anti-Cheat Services to Any Backend Architecture

Written by AccelByte Inc | Jan 15, 2026 3:15:00 PM

Epic Online Services (EOS) Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) is one of the most trusted protection layers in modern games. It’s proven across genres, works at scale, and fits cleanly into a wide range of architectures due to its modular design. Studios can adopt it on its own and connect it to whatever backend powers their game.

Many studios use our backend for player identity, sessions, moderation, and enforcement. To help them plug EOS Easy Anti-Cheat into their existing workflows, we built a custom app that routes EAC events into backend policies to automate actions and maintain consistency across systems.

It’s simply a clean way to connect anti-cheat detection signals with backend decisions. We built the pattern for our own platform, and open-sourced it so any team, using any backend, can adapt it to their needs.

How Anti-Cheat Signals Fit Into Your Backend

Easy Anti-Cheat handles detection, the crucial first step in any anti-cheat workflow. Then, your backend plays the central role in deciding what those signals actually mean for your game. The Extend app does not use EOS Sanctions directly. Instead, it receives violation data from EAC and forwards that to your backend’s own ban or reporting service, like the AccelByte Ban Service. If your backend uses EOS Sanctions, you could adapt the same pattern by calling the Sanctions Web API instead.

Most studios already have systems that manage player identity, matchmaking, progression, moderation tools, and enforcement rules. For anti-cheat to work smoothly, these systems need to stay aligned with the events coming from EAC. In practice, that means your backend needs to answer things like:

  • How should this event be categorized?
  • Is this a warning, a temporary restriction, or a permanent ban?
  • Should the player be removed from a match immediately?
  • Does this impact matchmaking, ranked progression, or account flags?
  • How should this be logged or surfaced in telemetry?

EAC, as with other anti-cheat solutions, requires a backend decision layer. EAC provides the detection signals; your backend applies the rules your game needs.

The pattern we’re sharing is simply a clean way to connect these two pieces so enforcement stays consistent across your systems, whether you’re using AccelByte, or any other backend.

Our Approach: A Lightweight Policy Service for Anti-Cheat Events

To help studios keep their enforcement logic consistent, our engineering manager, Damar Inderajati, built a lightweight service on AccelByte Extend that turns Epic Online Services Easy Anti-Cheat events into clear backend actions.

The idea is simple: EAC emits detection signals, and the backend needs a predictable way to interpret them. The service listens for EAC events coming from the game client or dedicated server, evaluates them against your enforcement rules, and then applies the appropriate backend action.

The flow looks like this:

  • EAC emits an event from the client or server
  • The Extend app receives the event from EAC
  • The event is evaluated against your policy
  • The correct action is taken:
    • warning
    • temporary restriction
    • permanent ban
    • player report
    • telemetry update
  • Player state stays consistent across backend systems

In this flow, the policy service becomes a single, clean place where anti-cheat rules live.

We built the implementation for our own backend environment, but the pattern itself is backend-agnostic. Any backend that handles player identity and enforcement can adopt the same flow. That’s why we open-sourced it, so that teams can reuse it directly or adapt it to their own architecture.

How It Works

If you’re using AccelByte, you don’t need to run or host anything yourself:  

  • Contact your account manager to activate the hosted Extend app in your environment. Check out the Extend app directory for documentation.
  • Configure your enforcement rules and let the service process EAC events automatically
  • No custom infrastructure or glue services required, everything runs inside your existing AccelByte deployment.

If You’re Using a Custom or Third-Party Backend:

The same logic is fully open-source and backend-agnostic so you can:
  • Clone the GitHub repo
  • Wire it to your own EAC event flow
  • Adapt the policy logic to your backend
  • Deploy it however you like (Docker, K8s, Cloud Run, etc.)

As long as your backend has a concept of users and enforcement actions, the pattern applies cleanly. Once wired in, anti-cheat detections will feed directly into your game's backend rules.

What’s Next

This integration of Epic Online Services EAC is part of our growing list of Extend Apps: small, practical patterns that help connect backend systems with external services in a clean, reusable way.

If you missed the previous entry, we walked through how to sync backend session state with Epic Online Services Voice using the same event-driven approach. Next up, we’re working on patterns for matchmaking and multiplayer server workflows focusing on things like:

  • coordinating session state with server lifecycle
  • handling backend-to-server glue logic
  • simplifying the pieces studios often rebuild over and over

We’ll share those as soon as they’re ready. If you have ideas or integrations you’d like to see covered, we’d love to hear from you on our Discord community.

For more information on Epic Online Services Easy Anti-Cheat, see documentation here.