Massively popular online shooter Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is banning players “at a rate of 6K-13K per day,” by anti-cheat partners, BattlEye.
That’s according to the company’s Twitter account (below), which said that more than 322,000 cheaters had been banned from PUBG as of Friday, October 13th.
This is a seemingly significant number, but only represents roughly 2.5 per cent of the more-than 13m people who have bought the Early Access title. BattlEye first announce its partnership with Bluehole Studio on April 4th, 2017.
BattlEye has said that the vast majority of banned players are from China. This should come as no surprise given that around 42 per cent of PUBG’s players are from China (according to information from SteamSpy (below), risen from 35 per cent in September. Therefore, it is statistically more likely that a higher number would be banned from there. The game had recently been ‘review-bombed’ by Chinese players unhappy with the fairly new inclusion of some in-game ads.
We are currently banning at a rate of 6K-13K per day, nearly 20K within the last 24 hours alone. The vast majority is from China.
— BattlEye (@TheBattlEye) October 13, 2017
PUBG's continued growth is driven by Asia. China and Korea account for half of its players pic.twitter.com/isya5veflG
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) October 9, 2017
The tweets could be seen as a way to publicise the proactivity of BattlEye and Bluehole in ensuring PUBG is a fair game. There have been other recent examples of developers striving to combat negativity and toxicity within their games’ communities. Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan recently spoke out about how hard and time-consuming dealing with negative elements of that game's community was.
Meanwhile, recently-fired Riot Games employee Aaron Rutledge has also said how taxing dealing with players can be.
The full PC release of PUBG was stated by Playerunknown to happen “before the end of Q4 2017,” and the Xbox release will supposedly occur in late 2017 also.
