Snuck into today's PUBG patch notes (opens in new tab) was a short update on Bluehole's progress against the cheaters that've made residence in the popular battle royale-style shooter.
"We have also been working hard to tackle down cheating players. This is an ongoing battle, but one we are committed to fighting," wrote PlayerUnknown. "We have banned 25,000+ users in the last 3 months, and work daily with BattlEye to add new protections and detections for cheats appearing on the market."
25,000 is a little more than 0.6% of the 4 million copies of PUBG sold. Of those sales, SteamSpy (opens in new tab) seems to think that PUBG has about 2.8 million active players right now. Anecdotally, PUBG doesn't have a massive problem with hackers, but in a game with such a large number of players per match, one hacker can negatively impact a lot of people.
Above: an apparent instance of cheating, recorded in April.
However, the number of players banned is dwarfed by other major competitive games. In February of this month, Blizzard banned almost 23,000 Overwatch players (opens in new tab) for cheating in Korea alone. In another spike, Valve banned 11,000 Dota 2 and CS:GO cheaters in a single day last September. Monitoring website vac-ban.com (opens in new tab) indicates that a few hundred Steam accounts receive VAC bans on an average day, with spikes and dips in between.
Battlegrounds uses BattlEye (opens in new tab), the same anti-cheat technology as H1Z1: King of the Kill, DayZ, Arma 3, Rainbow Six Siege, and ARK: Survival Evolved. BattlEye began as an anti-cheat solution for Battlefield Vietnam in 2004.
In 2015, Bohemia Interactive's Eugen Harton gave a GDC talk about the studio's approach to keeping pace with cheaters as its survival game surged in popularity.
For more on this subject, read our investigations into cheating as a business (opens in new tab), and why cheating is so difficult to eliminate completely (opens in new tab) in multiplayer games.
