Earlier this year, 120 people were arrested in China for alleged connection in either designing or making PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds cheat tools.

Then, in late April, another 15 were nabbed. Now the current arrest total is reportedly 141 alleged cheaters.

During a livestream yesterday Twitch streamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek stated that he received a one month ban from PUBG following an incident where he played alongside a hacker.

The ban comes on the heels of lengthy community speculation as to whether or not the game’s developers would actually discipline one of their game’s most popular streamers.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds players have been through a lot since the game's release in early 2017. Although the survival shooter went viral and earned the love of millions of fans, players had, and still have, a lot of complaints.

The game's been buggy. It's been full of cheaters. And now, the rollout of a $US10 ($13) Event Pass has sparked the ire of its already ireful community.

Pay-to-win games are garbage. Loot boxes are passe. Cosmetics are cute, but not a great incentive to keep playing. Game publishers have cycled through a bevy of monetisation gimmicks aimed at keeping gamers putting cash into their games, some more successful than others. Now, more and more of them seem to be coalescing around a new idea - the "battle pass".

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is getting a level select, presumably so everyone can avoid playing on Miramar. The option will come to the test server soon, allowing players to choose exactly where they get to blow each other up.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' latest patch gives the meditative survival shooter a big, welcome change of pace. Battlegrounds' blue circle, which progressively makes the playable area smaller, got tweaks to its speed and damage. Now, players who survive longer in Battlegrounds' death blender will face more interesting survival conditions as they pursue the number one spot.

Here's a new one: if you're trying to increase your PC market share, why not advertise that your computers can run "plug-ins" (read: cheats) better than the competition?

A new malware locks infected computers' files unless they fire up PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Unlike other ransomware, PUBG Ransomware doesn't want infected users' money; it just wants them to enjoy a game of Battlegrounds.

Six months after gritty survival shooter PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' debut, the cartoony, lighthearted survival shooter Fortnite Battle Royale came along. If Battlegrounds is the pitbull of this genre, Fortnite is the golden retriever. One of its weapons is the "boogie bomb". There's a gingerbread man skin and a "bear force one" glider. Lots of kids play, sometimes during school hours.

This week, a limited amount of players can test the latest map in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, codenamed "Savage." This map is significantly smaller than the game's other two maps. The resulting action provides a breath of fresh air, kicking Battlegrounds' usually deliberate pacing into something much more frantic.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds released on Steam early access on 23 March 2017. Since then, it has erupted into one of the largest games in the world and expanded with new features and maps. The road has been bumpy, with raucous highs and dire lows.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is spicing things up with special events -- limited time game modes with special weapons and squad rules. The latest event, which kicked off yesterday, adds a special flare gun for calling supply drops. It's a good idea, but the execution is too timid.

In the past 24 hours, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Mobile has soft-launched on Android devices in Canada, presumably to test things out before the wider launch. While Kotaku UK's office is not in Canada, we did manage to get our hands on a build of the new game, and have spent this morning trying our very best to win a chicken dinner.

Police arrested a Washington state woman earlier this month after she stabbed her boyfriend with a Japanese-style sword purchased at a shopping centre. She told the police that she stabbed him because she believed that he was cheating on her, and also because he played too much PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

For a long time, the love affair between PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Twitch looked as though it was meant to last. The blockbuster survival shooter captured the hearts of Twitch's biggest streamers all through 2017, and, in August, finally dethroned Twitch mainstay League of Legends in the "most hours watched" category (73.7 million to 71.9). Now, Battlegrounds is officially on the downswing. There's a new survival shooter in town - Fortnite Battle Royale - and it's kicking the crap out of its glitchy predecessor, Battlegrounds.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has slowly expanded with new weapons and an additional, somewhat controversial desert map. A new blog post by PlayerUnknown today outlines numerous upcoming changes to the game, the most interesting of which is a sneak peek at a chaotic-looking new map.

Chinese conglomerate Tencent has been working hard to bring Battlegrounds to mobiles after jumping on the Battle Royale juggernaut last year. And surprisingly, a game that relies on massive draw distances and 100 players running around a single server actually holds up well on mobile.

If you're a fan of pretty screenshots, then there's a good chance you'll have heard of ReShade. It's a post-processing tool that gives users more granular control over a game's visual effects, including the colour, depth of field and more.

Unfortunately, ReShade can also be used to give players unforseen advantages in multiplayer. So until an update is shipped out, ReShade has been banned in PUBG and more recently, Squad.

Wondering how Battlegrounds is supposed to look on smart devices? Yesterday, a mobile version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was released for China.