PUBG Player Numbers Have Dropped By Nearly A Third Since January
While PUBG Mobile and the Xbox One version of the game are both having a great deal of success, PUBG player numbers as a whole appear to be on a downhill slide. Player numbers have been declining rapidly, and the game has lost a third of its players since January according to Steam Charts.
Such a fast decline is rather surprising considering PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’s meteoric rise to stardom, eclipsing other, less well-known video games before it like The Culling to become the premiere Battle Royale game on Steam Early Access, gaining millions of players even before the game officially released.
However, the game appears to have become a victim of its own success. Criticism by fans appears to be related to how slowly the game is being updated and the lack of fixes for broken parts of the game, but most primarily the huge amounts of hackers that have been appearing in the game, especially since it opened up its servers to China, which has now become infamous for having a huge number of hackers to the point where fans are demanding Bluehole split them off into Chinese-exclusive servers to ensure fair play.
Epic Games’s own Battle Royale game, a revamped version of their 2016 video game Fortnite, has had the exact opposite happen to it, becoming one of the most-watched games on Twitch due to a steady stream of content and events helping it out (along with not nearly as much of a hacking problem). Fortnite player numbers are going up almost as fast as the PUBG player numbers are going down.
While PUBG Mobile and the Xbox One version of the game have both been accumulating a great deal of players, and a new map called Sanhok is being added to the PC version of the game; the PC version is losing players quickly and could be a sign of worse things to come unless Bluehole gets their act together.
Hopefully, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds can get all of those lost PUBG player numbers back, but it will require them to address the hacking issue and the updates.