Anti-cheat10 September 20264 min read

A publisher said the quiet part in writing

Most publishers say nothing about what they detect, but Krafton has published a roadmap that names its priority and gives a number.

By Lethal Research

Anti-cheat communication usually means silence: publishers ban players, share a number when it looks good, and never say what they look for. Naming a technique would tell the people building against it where to move, so publishers keep it to themselves.

Krafton named the technique in its PUBG 2026 anti-cheat roadmap, which is published on the game's own news feed. The roadmap puts DMA detection at the centre of the year's work and names Zakynthos, the in-house anti-cheat behind that work. It also gives a figure for the year before: roughly 260,000 permanent bans for DMA cheating during 2025.

External projectPUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Anti-Cheat 2026 RoadmapThis is the publisher's own page, so read it in full rather than relying on any summary of it.

What do the roadmap and the ban count tell you?

It is unusual to find all three things on one page. A roadmap on its own is marketing, and a number on its own is a headline. Naming the technique, the product doing the work and the count together is closer to a statement of position. It can be checked later against what the game does, and that is rarer than it should be.

The 260,000 figure is a count of enforcement, not a detection rate. It says nothing about how many DMA users there were, so it cannot be turned into a percentage of users caught. Anyone who gives you that percentage has made up the number of DMA users it depends on.

What the roadmap does establish is scale and intent. A publisher does not build a public roadmap around a technique it considers rare, and it does not name its own detection priority casually. Those two signals are worth more than the number itself.

Why does an in-house anti-cheat matter?

PUBG does not license EAC or BattlEye: its anti-cheat, Zakynthos, is Krafton's own. That breaks a habit people in this market rely on, which is treating anti-cheat knowledge as portable. What is learned about BattlEye in one title carries over to every title running BattlEye, but none of it carries over to an in-house stack.

So if a forum post says DMA is fine in one BattlEye game, applying that to PUBG starts from the wrong premise. The anti-cheat in PUBG is a different product.

What no seller can promise you

We are not telling you that a PUBG DMA build will be caught, or that it will not be. We do not sell one: our PUBG product is an external cheat that runs on the PC you play on. Nobody selling this hardware runs the anti-cheat or sees the data on the game's servers, so nobody can promise an outcome. What we can do is show you the publisher's own words before you spend money rather than after.

What should a buyer take from this?

Treat a published roadmap as better evidence than any vendor claim, because the publisher has no reason to flatter you.
Do not turn a ban count into a risk percentage. The number of DMA users is not public, and inventing it is how this market lies to buyers.
Before you carry any belief across from another game, check whether the title's anti-cheat is licensed or in-house.
Ask your provider what they do when a title's detection changes and how you find out, because that answer stays useful longer than any figure.

When a publisher says what it is working on, a buyer in this market gets that information for free. It is also the only kind of information that nobody here is trying to sell you.

The guides behind this post

DMA setup for PUBG, a game whose publisher names DMA in public

6 min read

PUBG runs Zakynthos, Krafton's own anti-cheat, and Krafton's 2026 roadmap puts DMA detection first. Krafton says it banned about 260,000 accounts for DMA cheating in 2025, and no other publisher covered here has said that about this hardware. This store sells no DMA cheat for PUBG, only an external one at /products/pubg, though every firmware tier lists the game.

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