Many PUBG players have bemoaned the fact the game is plagued by cheaters. From wall hackers to aimbots, PUBG has garnered something of a reputation for hosting naughty players.

And according to stats released by PUBG developer Bluehole over the past year, the game does indeed have an issue with hackers, as over 13 million bans have been handed out since June 2017 "due to the unauthorised use of illegal programs".

Reddit user sjk045 made the discovery by compiling data from 69 separate Bluehole posts on the company's Korean PUBG cafe website. Bluehole releases weekly updates listing the number of players banned - making it possible to collect all the data and calculate the total number.

Thanks sjk045 for this neat and handy graph.

Sjk045 even used the numbers to create a graph of the ban waves, and it's possible to see a clear peak in cheater bans at the beginning of this year. The graph also illustrates how the number of bans per wave has significantly increased compared to the numbers in autumn 2017. It's worth noting, however, that some banned players may have returned to the game under new names: the stats reveal the total number of accounts banned rather than individual people.

We have banned over 1,044,000 PUBG cheaters in January alone, unfortunately things continue to escalate. — BattlEye (@TheBattlEye) February 4, 2018

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings

Personally, I'd like to hope the diminishing number of banned players is due to a reduction in the amount of cheaters who can be kicked. But as sjk045 highlighted, the total number of PUBG players has also been dropping - earlier this year, it dipped below a million concurrent users on PC for the first time ever. This may well have affected the total players banned per week.

Still, the efforts to ban cheaters certainly fits in nicely with the new Fix PUBG campaign, which began in August and seeks to tackle issues such as bugs and hackers. It seems like Bluehole has at least been attempting the latter, but is it enough to save the game?