Apex Legends Isn't Pulling Punches With Cheating Bans

While free-to-play games are great in the sense that they allow you to play without putting any money on the line, that low barrier to entry also means that they're a prime target for cheaters. Nowhere is this more obvious than in competitive games like Apex Legends and Fortnite. In fact, battle royale as a genre seems to attract cheaters, as PUBG has had its own problems with people skirting the rules, despite the fact that it costs $30 through Steam.

Since Apex Legends first launched back in February, Respawn has been constantly grappling with cheaters and the software they use to exploit the game. Repsawn has updated us on its progress against the hordes of cheaters along the way, and now it's issued another update on the situation.

As it turns out, Respawn has banned almost a million cheaters since Apex Legends launched. In a blog post to the official Apex Legends site, Respawn notes that total bans are now sitting at 770,000 players. Not only that, but it's stopped 300,000 accounts from ever being created in the first place, stopping suspected cheaters from creating new accounts and trying again.

Over the past 20 days, Respawn has also banned more than 4,000 cheat seller accounts, and it now says that the total number of matches on PC affected by cheaters and spammers have been cut in half over the past month. While the problem of cheating is probably never going to be squashed entirely, Respawn does say that the game's new reporting system has helped a lot when it comes to discovering new cheats – even ones that would have previously been undetectable.

This effort to stem cheating is one that spans multiple teams at EA. Respawn says that it's been working with the developers at DICE, FIFA, Capital Games, EA Security and Fraud, Origin, and Easy Anti-Cheat to detect cheaters, though it obviously didn't reveal its methods in that blog post so it can keep them a secret from cheat makers. We'll see how long it takes Respawn to hit one million cheaters banned, but at this rate, it probably won't be more than a few weeks.