PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Sets Steam Record for Peak Player Count; 150,000 Cheaters Removed Since Launch

Since its launch back in March, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been riding a high, breaking a number of new milestones over the past couple of months. After beating non-Valve games in daily playtime hours earlier this month, and briefly stripping Dota 2 of its peak concurrent players record, the game has hit another milestone by reaching the highest peak concurrent player count on Steam ever.

PlayerUnknown's twitter account on Saturday tweeted that the game had 1,342,857 players online at the same time, yet again surpassing games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which recorded 1,295,114 and 854,801 players at the time, respectively. This comes after it was reported last month that the game 877,844 concurrent players on Steam, beating Dota 2.

Earlier this month, Battlegrounds reached another milestone by beating non-Valve games in hours spent daily on Steam. This is largely due to record sales on Steam, selling over 10 million copies since its launch in March. Despite being relatively new, the game has managed to eat away the audience for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is one of the biggest games on Steam.

A game as big as Battlegrounds would naturally attract some bad seeds and Eurogamer reports that the game has banned over 150,000 cheaters since its launch, out of which 8,000 were banned in a single 24-hour period. This is a substantial jump since last month when Bluehole Creative Director Brendan Greene tweeted that around 50,000 cheaters had been removed.

"If you're caught cheating or using any third-party tool that gives you an advantage we ban you straight away," Greene told Eurogamer. "Permanent ban, no appeal."