BattlEye reports that they’ve banned over a million PUBG accounts in January alone as the problem with hackers and cheaters continues to worsen.
Most gamers have heard of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the Battle Royale shooter game that has taken the world of gaming by storm, but few are familiar with BattlEye, the anti-cheat software vendor that works with the developers to keep PUBG free of cheaters for everyone. At least they’re trying to.
BattlEye is interwoven with the code of PUBG to ostensibly eliminate tampering with the game’s files and to catch cheaters in their tracks. The company started in 2004 with EA’s Battlefield Vietnam and then Battlefield 2. Later it’d go on to be used in online multiplayer games like Rainbow Six Siege, Arma I, II, and III, as well as the current generation of shooters like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite.
The way it works is kept as a closely guarded secret, but essentially there’s BattlEye software on both the player side and the server side constantly checking to see if the player is doing anything other than playing the game. If the system detects something fishy in the netcode it bans the player’s account.
According to BattlEye’s website, "The player simply will not notice that BattlEye is running in the background.”
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And while the numbers BattlEye releases make it seem like they’re pretty effective, tweeting that they’d banned a total of 1.5 million cheaters last December, their most recent tweet should give everyone cause for grave concern.
Last weekend, BattlEye reported on Twitter that they’d banned over a million players in January alone. “We have banned over 1,044,000 PUBG cheaters in January alone,” the company wrote. “Unfortunately things continue to escalate.”
Considering that PUBG has about 30 million total players on Steam, and close to 4 million players on Xbox, banning a million players in a single month makes it extremely likely that everyone has been in at least one game with a cheater present. In fact, with these numbers the expected amount of cheaters per 100 player PUBG match is three.
That’s right. Three players in every match are probably cheating.
Even banning a million players a month, BattlEye seems to be struggling beneath the rising wave of PUBG hackers. With news that PUBG has delayed their most recent solution to this epidemic, it looks like the cheater scourge will continue for a little while longer at least.