Tencent working with Chinese police to fight PUBG cheats - report
30 cases have been exposed as PUBG's community is cleaned up ahead of official Chinese launch
Tencent is working with the Chinese police to expose and arrest makers of cheat software for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Bloomberg reports.
According to Bloomberg, which has translated a report from Tencent's own QQ service, the combined effort has already led to 120 arrests across 30 individual cases of cheat software. Those convicted of "disrupting computer networks" can be sentenced to five or more years in jail under Chinese law.
This crackdown arrives ahead of Tencent launching PUBG on local servers, having agreed to be the Chinese publisher of both the PC game and a new mobile version in November last year. Speaking to Kotaku recently, PUBG's creative director Brendan Greene said that "the majority" of the game's cheaters are in China.
"There's a massive cheat market not only in China, but around the world," he said. "But it's seen as kind of a little bit more acceptable to cheat in games in China. Also geographically, they just have a lot more people than anywhere else in the world."
At the end of December, PUBG's anti-cheat partner BattlEye said that it had banned 1.5 million player accounts in the game's lifetime. That figure was released a week after Bluehole subsidiary PUBG Corp. confirmed that the game had reached 30 million players worldwide.
"Fostering a game environment that's fair to all players is crucial to us," PUBG Corp.'s Lee Do-hyung told Bloomberg. "We're committed to working to address this both now and in the future."