Developers of the popular battle royale game, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) have released a statement updating players on the status of their anti-cheating efforts in the game.
The update was posted on PC-gaming platform Steam and details the arrest by Chinese authorities of 15 individuals that were suspected of developing and selling hack programs for PUBG. As a result of the arrests, the suspects have been fined over $5 million.
According to the statement from Chinese authorities, some of the programs included Trojan Horse viruses, which “developers used to control users’ PCs, scan their data, and extract information illegally”.
Of the 15 suspects, there were only five that were explicitly mentioned by name: “OMG”, “FL”, “火狐”, “须弥” and “炎黄”.
Ongoing efforts
Cheating in PUBG is a major issue that the game's developers take “extremely seriously”. This much is clear from the anti-cheating software that they've employed, BattlEye, which has banned over 1 million players in January 2018 alone.
We have banned over 1,044,000 PUBG cheaters in January alone, unfortunately things continue to escalate.February 4, 2018
Aside from the rising threat of Chinese hackers and cheaters, there are also growing concerns over mouse and keyboard players using emulations to dominate the mobile version of the game.
“We’ll continue to crack down on hacking/cheating programs (and their creators)”, promises the PUBG Corp team, “until our players are free to battle it out in a totally fair environment”.
