PUBG's anti-cheat system is banning more than 6,000 players a day

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Nearly 20,000 banned on Friday.

I haven't come across a single hacker in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Not an obvious one at least. Maybe that means I need to be more observant, or perhaps it's a testament to the game's anti-cheat system, which is banning more than 6,000 suspected cheaters every day.

That's according to BattlEye, which polices the game's servers. Its official account tweeted yesterday that between 6,000 and 13,000 players are getting their marching orders daily.

On Saturday morning, it had cracked down on nearly 20,000 players within the previous 24-hour period. The "vast majority" of those were from China, where in-game ads recently caused a flood of negative reviews of the game to hit Steam.

In total, the service has blocked 322,000 people, double the number that was reported by the game's creator Brendan Greene, aka PlayerUnknown, last month. That's a rapid rise.

PUBG continues to go from strength to strength: it passed the 2 million concurrent players mark three days ago, and today it peaked at just under a whopping 2.2 million, official Steam stats show. According to SteamSpy, more than 16 million people own it.

Have you come across many hackers while playing?

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.