PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has become the first game in Steam’s history to see over a million people play it every day for a year.
As spotted over on PCGamesN, with figures from SteamDB, the former golden child of the ‘a hundred enter, one leaves’ genre maintained a constant over the past 365 (now more) days, even with a marked drop in its popularity over the past nine months.
PUBG broke the million players in a day mark September 8, 2017 when 1,028,275 people played the game in a 24-hour period. Since then, no day has gone by with anything less than a million individuals booting up and playing the game that made battle royales cool.
Those player numbers peaked at an astounding 3,257,248 on January 13 this year, while in the period since hitting a million the numbers bottomed out recently at 1,005,484 on September 5. While the rot has definitely set in and numbers have been dropping steadily since the January peak, PUBG is still getting a lot of people through its doors on a daily basis.
It’s worth pointing out the Twitch figures for the game too, seeing as SteamDB provides those: a peak of 597,309 viewers on the Amazon-owned streaming service was seen on July 27, owing to the PGI PUBG Global Invitational in Berlin. The charity event saw the likes of Ninja and DrDisRespect taking part for a chance to win hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a charity of their choice.
How PUBG stacks up against its main competitor Fortnite, though, we’re not entirely sure. The latter doesn’t operate through Valve’s storefront, so tracking figures for player numbers aren’t readily available. It’s not too much of a push to assume its numbers are absurdly high too.