PUBG: Battlegrounds was one of the games that made battle royale mainstream — and one that fought a long, public battle against cheating.
BattlEye does the heavy lifting
PUBG is protected by BattlEye, a kernel-mode anti-cheat licensed across dozens of major titles. It loads with the game, inspects memory, scans for known cheat signatures and verifies the game's code has not been altered. It also collects hardware identifiers and reports them to its servers.
A reputation for strict enforcement
PUBG's developer has historically taken an aggressive stance, running large ban waves and treating confirmed cheating as a permanent matter rather than a temporary one. That posture is part of why PUBG bans are spoken about as hard to escape.
Hardware-aware bans
When enforcement reaches the hardware level, BattlEye records identifiers from the physical PC — disk serials, network MAC addresses, the machine GUID, and firmware values such as the SMBIOS UUID. A new account created on a banned machine can be caught by that fingerprint. Software-level identifiers can be changed; the firmware ones cannot be rewritten by ordinary software, which is what makes a firmware-based ban so durable.
Ban waves vs instant bans
Some PUBG bans land instantly when a known cheat is detected; others arrive in coordinated waves, so a cheater is not tipped off the moment they are flagged. Both feed the same hardware records.
The takeaway
PUBG pairs a mature anti-cheat with a strict enforcement culture. The realistic summary: detection is BattlEye's job, durability is the developer's policy, and once a ban reaches the firmware layer it is the hardest kind to move past.