PUBG Banned Over 13 Million Players in 69 Weeks

Despite being certifiably not Fortnite, PUBG still has the distinction of being the second-most-popular Battle Royale game on the planet, which means it’s still got more than enough people to keep it going strong, with about half a million regular players. Maybe not enough people to support a TV show or cartoon or whatever it was their CEO was going on about earlier this year, but enough to justify keeping the servers running, the game updating, and of course, banning the many, many cheaters that swarm these games like flies around a carcass. Which is important, because if you ask anyone who plays PUBG, they’ll tell you that cheaters and hackers are an epidemic.

But one Redditor, sjk045 (as reported by PC Gaming), decided to see if there was any truth to the often-cited claim that Bluehole, one of the developers, wasn’t doing enough to stop hackers and cheaters. And what he discovered was that over a 69 week period, the developer had actually banned a whopping 13 million accounts in their fight against cheaters.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that this is accounts, not people: and since most hardcore cheaters will be more than happy to make new accounts, the number of actual people targeted by these bans are probably a great deal less than 13 million. These also do not include temporary bans, which means that all of these 13 million bans are permanent: no wonder so many fewer people seem to be playing PUBG, then.

It’s an interesting little read, and the Redditor clearly knows their stuff, which is why it’s kind of a shame they’re wasting their talents digging through the data of a game like PUBG. But it also proves just how serious the developer is about keeping competition healthy, so… chalk this up as good news, I suppose.