Without a doubt, many would agree that Bluehole Studio's battle royale title PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is one of the best shooter games of 2017, but there are some who might not have been able to fully take part in the game and its meteoric rise to success due to foul play. To be more specific, since its launch in March earlier this year, there have been a fair share of cheaters in the title, but thankfully, PUBG's developers have remained diligent about keeping a lid on spoil sports, with the latest number of banned users being in the millions.
As seen in the tweet below, as of yesterday, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has officially banned upwards of 1.5 million players, thanks to the developer's security technology of choice, BattlEye. There's no telling what kind of offenses put those users on the banned list, but no matter how it's sliced, that's a lot of gamers barred from PUBG.
When looking at the data from SteamSpy, there over 26 million Steam accounts in possession of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, so it stands to reason that the bans represent a pretty significant portion of that user base. Plus, BattlEye has reported an ever-increasing number of bans in the last few months, resulting in a total of 50,000 in August, 300,000 in October, 700,000 in November, and now 1.5 million in December.
While the attempt to combat cheaters in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a valiant one on the part of Bluehole Studio and the title's developers, it would be impossible for the game to be rid of cheats entirely. Be that as it may, developers have also created a unique way outside of wielding the Banhammer to stymie cheating in PUBG by turning matchmaking against cheaters, as players with a history of using cheat software are being put in matches with other cheaters. Perhaps these two approaches to cheating combined–that is, matchmaking tweaks and outright banning–will cause cheater numbers to dwindle significantly.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is available now for PC and Xbox One.
Source: @TheBattlEye – Twitter