PUBG Mobile Permanently Banned 2.2 Million Cheaters In Just One Week

Forum 3 years ago

PUBG Mobile Permanently Banned 2.2 Million Cheaters In Just One Week

PUBG Mobile banned over 2.2 million player accounts in just one week in an effort to cut down on the game’s widespread cheating problem. The wave of bans comes a little over a week from the launch of PUBG Mobile’s “New Era” update, which aims to bring improvements to nearly every aspect of the game.

For a time, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds seemed to be inescapable. As one of the founders of the battle royale genre, PUBG helped usher in an entirely new kind of game that would quickly take the world by storm. Since PUBG’s heyday, its popularity has been usurped by Fortnite, which siphoned away large portions of the audience thanks to its free-to-play model and multiple pop culture crossovers. While PUBG Mobile has had crossovers of its own, including one with The Walking Dead, Fortnite has managed a steady stream of partnerships with Marvel and DC, bringing lots of beloved characters into its chaotic competition. Even though PUBG has fallen from the height of its appeal, its console and PC versions and PUBG Mobile remain extremely popular.

Evidently, PUBG Mobile has stayed popular enough to attract swaths of cheaters. The game has had a major problem with hacking for awhile now, and it seems that developer PUBG Corporation has had enough. PUBG Mobile’s Twitter account recently announced that it permanently banned more than 2.2 million accounts and more than 1.4 million devices from the game just between August 20th and 27th. The distinction between account and device bans is important, because while account bans can be relatively easily circumvented, device bans are much more difficult to escape. Rather than simply make a new account, players who are subject to a device ban won’t be able to play at all using the phone they were caught cheating with. According to PUBG Corp., nearly a third of the bans are due to players using x-ray vision, with only slightly fewer using auto-aim hacks.

PUBG Mobile recently got an unexpected boost from Apple. As the phone maker is engaged in a public legal battle with Epic Games over the developer’s monetization of Fortnite, it promoted PUBG Mobile, Fortnite’s biggest competition, on its App Store. It’s not clear how big of an impact that will have on PUBG Mobile’s player population, but with Fortnite currently unavailable on the App Store, some former players may flee to PUBG. And if they do, they’ll find a game with far fewer hackers than it had just a week ago.

While the rush for developers to create their own battle royales has slowed somewhat - or at least morphed into twists on the formula like Fall Guys - PUBG Mobile is still popular for players who want to relive the good old days of just a few years ago. For newcomers and players who’ve been there since the beginning, this latest ban wave will make PUBG Mobile a much better place to be.