The Chinese game market is the biggest video game market. It contains the largest gaming audience for competitive gaming such as PUBG (Player Unknown Battleground). Tencent and Bluehole Inc. are the video game distributor for PUBG in China so they control the game servers. With such a larger gaming audience, there is also a huge group of hackers. Rather than simply banning their players, Tencent also sends the Chinese police. Law enforcement has found at least 30 cases and 120 people suspected of developing cheating software. The software ranges from X-ray vision and auto-targeting. Even people who have past convictions will go to jail.

Hackers are even offering their cheating services on PUBG’s top leaderboards. The top 10 players are all hackers with names such as “contact QQ574352672,” a private account where people can purchase the cheating software. Kim Hak-joon, who analyzes gaming stocks for South Korea’s Kiwoom Securities Co. (PUBG is a Korean game) stated: “Cheaters mostly drive away new users, and without retaining new users, PUBG won’t be able to consolidate its early success and become a long-lasting hit.”

Bluehole’s anti-cheats partner, Battleye, has banned 1.6 million accounts which are about 6% of the total community. People convicted of disrupting computer networks face five years’ imprisonment or more under Chinese law. In 2010, a couple was fined 3 million yuan (465,000) and sentenced to nine years for selling cheat software, according to local media reports. China and Tencent are also very familiar with the number of hackers and cheat creators. Tencent has even filed a lawsuit against piracy after they signed exclusive distribution rights with global record labels. It’s a tough fight that even Allen Zhang, head of anti-cheating, stated “It’s a never-ending battle…You could come up with something effective today, but encounter something completely different the next day.”

The Chinese market will probably never remove the number of hackers in China. With the criminalization of cheating, distributors will always exist. They may even produce them in different countries to offer their services like boosting in League of Legends.

Sources:

Bloomberg

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