Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds has just passed the one million concurrent players milestone for the second time, which isn’t bad for a game that everybody thought was dying due to the soaring popularity of Fortnite and the release of Blackout in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
PUBG had an incredible start to 2018, seeing an amazing 3.2 million concurrent players in January. However, since then player numbers have declined month on month, with October being the last month to hit one million concurrent players. That is until now, of course, which has been the first time player numbers have actually increased since January.
It’s hard to say why players have been returning to PUBG. My gut tells me that they’ve just had enough of some of the annoying Blackout bugs and that they’ll return to COD soon enough; however, it’s more likely to be thanks to the various updates to the game, such as the recent addition of the Vikendi snow map as well as a whole host of bug fixes.
It’s important to note that these player numbers are only for PC / Steam. We don’t have concurrent player stats for console but they have most likely increased too as new content has also been released for consoles. PUBG is also now available on the Xbox Game Pass which would have no doubt given the game many players on the Xbox.
Although this is great news for PUBG it’s still a long way off the games former glory, but with some more popular updates—such as the overhauled parachute system, which allows you to glide or dive during free fall and lets you cut your chute before hitting the ground for a quicker and more skillful descent—there’s no reason that the game can’t keep its upward trajectory and beat off the other battle royale games that seem to be flooding the market as of late. There’s plenty of players interested in the game mode for three quality games to survive (PUBG, Fortnite and Blackout), but this hinges on the developers adding new content and changing things up so that the game stays fresh.
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