Valve bans over 40,000 Steam accounts as summer sale entices cheaters
Largest mass banning of accounts in the digital platform's history
More than 40,000 Steam users have been banned from the leading games marketplace.
Valve locked these accounts late last week on the grounds of cheating as its summer sale wound down for another year, Dot eSports repots.
On July 6th, more than 30,000 bans were made by the Valve Anti-Cheat system before 12pm Eastern Time, ramping up to 40,411 by the end of the day. Normally, VAC bans an average of 3,000 to 4,000 accounts per day.
It is the highest number of bans in a single day ever made by Valve, beating the 15,227 accounts locked back in October 2016.
The spike has been attributed to the Steam Summer Sale, the theory being that many of these banned accounts were newly created by players who wanted to pick up games on the cheap in order to try out cheats and exploits.
Dot eSports also reports that 4,972 Counter-Strike: GO accounts were banned in-game, meaning cheaters were also being reported by fellow players.