After reaching yet another milestone by selling over 30 million copies on the PC through the Steam platform, it seems PUBG active player fan base isn’t growing at the same rate.
Amidst rampant reports of cheating, it was reported that the battle-royal style game had registered its first decline in concurrent player numbers. After peaking at 3,257,248 concurrent players in mid-January, its current mid-February numbers are only capping out at a little over 2 million.
Many like Bloomberg tech journalist Yuji Nakamura believe that the drop can be attributed to the PUBG developer not taking cheaters seriously. Tweeting out a few days ago that:
“PUBG hit 30m in sales this week, but it is churning hard. Bluehole still not taking cheaters seriously enough imo”
PUBG has however cracked down on cheaters, banning over a million in the month of January alone. The developer even implemented new anti-cheat measures in their latest PUBG update. The developer has also started pursuing legal action in certain countries against cheat distributors.
Some people also attribute PUBG’s player dip to its competitor, Fortnite; another similar open-world battle royal style shooter game. With the game managing to surpass PUBG’s concurrent active players on PC by over 200,000 a few weeks back. The game has made some massive inroads going from 60,000 concurrent players to over 3.4 million in the span of just a few months.
Unlike, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Fornite also has the benefit of being available on multiple platforms like the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and even the Mac while PUBG is only available on PC save for a few mobile ports that are exclusive to China.
However, not everything is gloomy for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds with the online shooter still occupying the top spot for games by current players on the Steam platform, over taking Valve’s very own Dota 2 back in August last year.
