PUBG or fully known as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was the game that kickstarted the battle royale trend that we see in games today. But, ever since Fortnite came in to steal the show, the numbers have started to decline. The newcomer on the block, Apex Legends, surely hasn’t helped with the situation at all.
When PUBG came out back in early 2017 it didn’t garner much attention right away. But, fast forward to the summer of 2017 and the game spiked in growth thanks to popular twitch streamers that streamed the game 24/7 at the time. The game peaked at over 3 Million players on steam alone. With the PC version gaining so much popularity over the first year Bluehole decided to launch the game on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in late 2018.
Surprisingly, the popular battle royale game also got a mobile version following Fortnite that had a crazy amount of success, especially in some Asian countries. It quickly beat Fortnite to the active number of players on mobile and is still dominating the mobile market. The mobile version of the game is being played soo much that in India they have banned the game outright. If caught playing the game, you will go to jail. Players have also been spending more money on PUBG mobile as found from a report in late 2018
The game has had a consistent decrease in PC players since February of 2018 and it showed no signs of slowing down until recently. PUBG did have a slight uptick in users in Dec 2018 and Jan 2019. unlucky for the game, Apex Legends made a drop in February that quickly gained popularity and players. This lead to yet again another decline in PUBG’s player base.
The decrease is mainly because of Fortnite and Apex Legends. while Fortnite was already making the game suffer in player count, the new popular game on the block Apex Legends made an entry last month and is fastly becoming the most popular game around. Apex legends even beat Fortnite’s time to 50 Million players. This is probably due to the fact that Fortnite and Apex Legends are free-to-play on all platforms which garner’s them more players.
The game seems to have overall streamlined from its decrease and has been pulling in at least 900K players daily. while this has been the case for the past few months there is a good chance that the player count will decrease even further. The game could possibly even die altogether if Bluehole does not do anything about this soon. They should definitely think of making PUBG go free-to-play just like it’s competitors. PUBG’s mobile version of the game is hugely popular, maybe the PC and Consoles version could be too if they go free-to-play.
