Over 1 million accounts locked in January 2018

In the first month of 2018, the number of accounts locked in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) reached over one million. Anti-cheat system BattlEye announced this past Sunday.

We have banned over 1,044,000 PUBG cheaters in January alone, unfortunately things continue to escalate.

— BattlEye (@TheBattlEye) 4 February 2018

The tweet shows that the system is struggling with rampant hacking in this popular Battle Royale game. PUBG started working with BattlEye in December 2016. However, despite a lot of countermeasures, hacking was still a burning problem throughout 2017 for PUBG.

When BattlEye mentioned the word “escalate” (to continue to escalate), BattlEye was really serious. Last September, the creator of PUBG, PlayerUnknown, announced that 150,000 accounts had been banned, and this number continues to multiply. In October, the number of banned accounts doubled to 322,000, with 6,000 to 13,000 bans per day. By mid-November, a total of 700,000 accounts were banned with 100,000 accounts banned in just two weekends. In December, that number hit 1.5 million before adding another 1.04 million in January alone.

These are worrying statistics for publishers Bluehole and BattlEye. The number of hackers is mainly from China, according to the Anti-Cheat report in October, and it seems that this will be the market that companies will have the most difficulty to handle. The China region is known for its ability to circumvent regulations in other games as well, where hacking services/software are openly sold online.

Whatever the solution, Bluehole and BattlEye need to figure it out quickly, especially when tournaments are looking to take PUBG to the eSports level. If hacking is still rampant, it can create inadequacies in online competition, or worse, erase the ability to compete online for an entire region (ie only online).