Krafton’s Battle Royale – Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG: Battlegrounds as it is now called, had 667,399 concurrent players playing the game after the Free to play update. According to steamcharts.com, this is the highest player count the game has seen since December 2019, when the player count was 686,239 concurrent players.
But during the rise of Coronavirus in April 2020, Chinese game services were forced offline due to a Chinese mourning day for Covid-19. Since other services were offline, players turned to PUBG PC and April 2020 saw a peak of 913k players, but that wasn’t to last as the average for April 2020 was still only 242k players on PUBG PC.
Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds has the record for the highest number of players ever, on Steam. In January 2018, 9 months after its release PUBG PC hit a peak of 3,236,027 players. This number is more than twice the number of players on the next most popular game on the list, that is, CSGO which hit a peak of 1,305,714 players in April 2020.
But once the most popular PC game ever, PUBG PC hasn’t aged well over time. The game had regularly been losing players over the course of the next three years and the graphs showed a downward trajectory.
Krafton had been working regularly to improve the game, introducing new maps such as Vikendi, Paramo, and very recently, Taego to bring more players into the fold. They brought new weapons into the game, such as the Panzerfaust and the Lynx AMR, Grenade Launchers and C4s, new vehicles, and a ton of new skins ranging from K-pop group Blackpink themes to footballer Heung-Min Son’s signature helmet.
FPS optimizations, lesser system requirements for PUBG PC, were all part of the plan as well but the Average player count failed to cross the 200k mark for over a year, and the 300k mark hadn’t been seen in 2 years.
This also led to them launching PUBG Lite for players with low-end systems, but it couldn’t hit the peak it was expected to.
Since PUBG PC is now free on Steam, the players who had been playing the game long before were also given rewards for their loyalty. They got the free Plus+ upgrade for sticking with the game even when it wasn’t free to play. Returning players will also get 1300 G-Coin, the in-game currency that is used to buy Skins and crates and other customizable entities in the game. Players also got a new crate for their loyalty with some new skins and outfits for them to try on.
After going free to play though, the peak player count has almost doubled since last month and the average player count is expected to cross the 300k mark if it continues like this. The queue times in all regions have decreased rapidly and there are almost 0 bots in-game once you get connected. This is what PUBG PC was all about, 100 players battling to the death on an 8×8 map. So get your hands on PUBG, without spending any money and hop in the BattleGrounds.
