Valve has started its most violent action against users cheating on Steam.

That's according to PCGamesN, who reports that the PC giant has started carrying out mass bans using its Valve Anti-Cheat tech.

Looking at SteamDB's ban charts, which tracks users restricted from the Steam platform, there were 28,409 accounts axed on Wednesday of this week, with another 61,486 banned on Thursday.

Valve is yet to explain why this wave of action is happening now - but it's likely that a brand new exploit was found on the Steam platform.

Fighting cheaters is one of the biggest problems facing PC games companies at the moment. Playerunknown's Battlegrounds developer PUBG Corp's struggle against bad actors is well known, with people being arrested and publicly shamed in China.

Valve itself is turning to machine learning to try and spot cheating in its own, with 1,700 employed in this process. Microsoft is in the process of attempting to patent a platform-level machine-learning anti-cheat method.