Despite Rampant Cheating, PUBG Has Few Cheaters

Hackers. They may seem like they’re overrunning PUBG, but looks can be deceiving, or at least that’s what the game’s director claims.

Odds are if you play PUBG, you have either heard about or encountered at least one hacker/cheater. Some use aimbots to pull off effortless headshots that would make even Hawkeye blush; others give their bullets the ability to phase through walls before painting the ground with opposing players’ spleens. Some players insist these cheaters are everywhere, either because there are so many hackers or because they use hacks to teleport around the map and seem like they’re everywhere, but game director Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene claims otherwise.

In an interview with PCGamesN, Greene stated the population of hackers in the game is, as he puts it, “very low.”

“Internally I see the numbers and the situation is not as bad as you may think,” explained Greene. “The amount of hackers in the game is very low. You might have bad luck experiencing hackers on a daily level, but the level is quite low. We’re rolling out new systems and client tech that should lock that number down even further. We want to provide a clean space for everyone to play in, especially if it’s to succeed as an esport.”

Despite the “low” number of cheaters in the game, PUBG Corp. still treats cheating programs as serious business. Heck, the company doesn’t even give any quarter to those who take advantage of cheats, even if they don’t actually cheat. Just look no further than the Twitch streamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek. The man is a legitimate gamer who has acquired over three million followers, but several weeks ago he got the bright idea to team up with another player in a solo match. Now, that is already a bannable offense (it’s called a solo match for a reason, after all), but he had the bad luck to ally with a hacker. Instead of cutting his losses, he went for broke, riding around in the hacker’s flying Volkswagen Kombi van and scoring unfair kills thanks to the cheater’s x-ray vision wall hack. Even though Shroud is considered by many to be the face of PUBG —the developer even released some Shroud-themed weapon skins— he was still banned for the double whammy of teaming up with another player in a solo match and profiting off of that player’s cheats.

Greene is confident the dev team can iron out PUBG’s hacking issues, but that remains to be seen.