PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds became the first Steam title to have more than a million concurrent players for a full year over the weekend, a streak that came to an end two days later.
Third-party tracking site SteamDB, which keeps track of player count in addition to other data, confirmed that PUBG hit the coveted 1,000,000 mark every day for the past year, from September 8, 2017 to September 9, 2018, running 366 days in total. But it failed to do so on Monday, September 10, landing at 960,263.
On Steam, the game’s all-time peak came on January 13, with over 3.257 million players. PUBG has witnessed a steady drop since then, while its battle-royale rival Fortnite has seen tremendous growth.
Despite that, no other title on Steam – including Valve’s own massively popular Dota 2 – comes close to the numbers set by PUBG. By comparison, Dota 2’s all-time peak was just shy of 1.3 million in February 2016. Those are the only two games to cross a million concurrent players on the PC gaming platform.
There’s no way to compare its popularity to Fortnite on PC, which isn’t available on Steam but via Epic Games’ own launcher. Also, these numbers don’t factor in the other platforms the two games are available on: Xbox One, Android and iOS for PUBG; and PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS and macOS for Fortnite.
For what it’s worth, according to a July report from SuperData, Fortnite leads earnings on console while PUBG is ahead of its competitor on PC.
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