Recently, BattleEye announced that they had band 25000 cheaters in the game Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds within the last 24 hours. They also announced that they are banning about 6,000 to 13,000 players per day with the majority being from China. These numbers are simultaneously impressive and depressing. If 6,000 to 13,000 people are being banned everyday that’s 180,000 per month conservatively. On the high side that’s 390,000! There’s a lot of talk about PUBG being the next big thing in eSports. Over the last 30 days they’ve averaged 992,000 players on concurrently. They’ve even peeked at over 2 million people on at the same time. These record-breaking numbers are staggering. However, it also presents a major problem.
Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds Growth in Asia
A majority of the popularity and success of this game can be attributed to its growth in the Asian market. Specifically China and Korea. As noted by steam spy, 42% of players are from China while 7% are from Korea. Almost half of the entire player base comes from two countries. This change in growth has changed the share of players from the United States from 40% to only 10%.
However, as noted many of the cheaters are coming from China in area with a negative reputation for cheating in video games. Bluehole, the company in charge of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, is located in Korea and able to take a more proactive approach in that region. However China proves more difficult. If they believe that Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds can be the next big eSports game they need to be able to stop such easy hacking. Online tournaments are a major part of how eSports develop. And if they are unable to stop this from happening in the future Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds may well just be a flash in the pan.
Stopping the Hackers
The company that Bluehole is working with, BattleEye is a major player in gaming security. Some of the top games in PvP use them to keep their games safe and fair. They are clearly pulling out all the stops to try and mitigate the cheating issue. However it doesn’t seem like it’s effective with players bemoaning the rapid cheating problem all across the internet. I myself have had to deal with cheaters and it gets extremely annoying. Watching somebody slip into the ground to avoid being shot or getting rapidfire headshotted by somebody with a revolver is not a fun time. Bluehole is going to need to really focus in on the cheating issue. Now that they have their own subsidiary focusing specifically on Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds we might see some light at the end of this tunnel. But until then Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds looks like it’s anything but eSports ready