Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Launch Seems to Have Made No Dent in PUBG’s Numbers

Despite its early record-setting success across platforms and being the most-watched game on Twitch over the weekend, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 hasn’t made a dent in the player base of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on PC, according to a new report.

Video game analytics site GitHyp claims that PUBG “only saw a 4 percent decline in players [this weekend] when comparing its average concurrent players on Steam” to last weekend. PUBG lost about 24,000 players, which GitHyp notes was “far lower than some of its worst months such as back in May 2018 when the player base dropped by over 20 percent”.

This despite Activision promoting the new title with top Twitch streamers such as Ninja, Shroud and Dr Disrespect, who helped carry Black Ops 4 to the top of the streaming charts.

While PUBG hasn’t been affected by Black Ops 4 in the first week, a report from June stated that the game has lost nearly half its player base since January, likely due to Fortnite. It went from a peak of 3.23 million players in January to 1.75 million players in May. Average player count has fallen every month as well, going from 1.58 million in January to 0.8 million in June.

GitHyp speculates that Black Ops 4’s failure to steal players away from PUBG means “it’ll be interesting to see how long the hype can last” for Activision and Treyarch’s latest title.

Activision announced Sunday that Black Ops 4 had set several day-one digital records, becoming the best-selling day-one full game on PlayStation Store globally according to Sony, the best-selling day-one Activision game on the Xbox Store, and doubling the launch day sales on PC year-on-year.

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