A few weeks ago, the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds developer Bluehole Studio announced that the Early Access blockbuster has surpassed 1 million concurrent players on Steam. Now, it turns out that the Battle Royale shooter has reached yet another milestone of 1.5 million users. Currently, PUBG is only available on Steam for PC gamers, although a console version is in the works.
There are two games in the history of steam that have passed the million concurrent players mark. These are the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Dota 2. The latter has put a record of 1, 291,320 players in March 2016, but it has not surpassed that record since then.
As a matter of fact, reddit users have posted statistics showing that Dota 2 has the lowest active players since 2014. Naturally, redditors have tried to propose an adequate explanation. Some of them stated that they have stopped playing Dota 2 because of the matchmaking. They went on to say that they did not want to play together with people whose level of expertise does not match theirs and added that the language barrier was also a complicating factor. Others said that there was a lot to be desired as far as the Ranked Mode was concerned and the lack of action on Valve’s end had a negative impact on Dota 2 playability.
Some players simply pointed the lack of interest and said they would resume playing Dota 2 as soon as they see Valve is trying to keep it fresh and enjoyable.
Nevertheless, the decrease in the active users does not mean that Dota 2 is dying. Quite the opposite, the current number of players is higher than the numbers of many other MOBAs. Still, as RealGear reported, the PUBG presence on Steam has a negative effect on other popular shooters, too.
As for the PUBG and its constantly increasing popularity, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” himself commented that the team is planning a ranked game mode as well as other progression systems to ensure optimal player engagement. Bluehole is also going to implement changes to the Blue Zone to make it fairer.
In other news, Bluehole has recently run into a controversy with Epic Games over the upcoming Fortnite Battle Royale mode. Bluehole representatives have expressed their concerns that the game would replicate the gaming experience, PUBG is associated with.
