Just a day after Steam’s huge Summer Sale ended, over 40,000 accounts were banned by Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC). This is the largest amount of single-day bans from the auto-detection system. The previous record high took place on October 12, 2016, and saw only 15,227 accounts banned, a paltry number in comparison.
On top of the accounts caught by VAC, another 4,972 accounts where banned due to in-game reporting. According to tracking site Vac-Ban, the bans resulted in a loss of almost $10,000 in cosmetic skins and other digital items.
Dot Esports, who first noticed the bans, said that VAC detected 30,000 cheating accounts before 12pm ET on July 6 alone. In the days following July 6, around 1,000 accounts were banned each day. The Steam Summer Sale ran from June 22-July 5.
To put these numbers into perspective, VAC bans about 3,000 to 4,000 accounts on an average day. It seems a ton of players just couldn’t resist cheating when the games were so cheap. Valve takes cheating very seriously, and considering this enormous spike in bans, it makes you wonder how many accounts will be banned after next year’s Summer Sale.
