PUBG hits 3 million concurrent players, breaking its own record

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, the survival shooter that has emerged as the most popular PC game of the year, has just beaten its own record for most concurrent players.

Early this morning Battlegrounds eclipsed 3 million players. Steam itself put the number at 3,106,358 exactly.

To put that into perspective, the game in second place right now, Dota 2, has only ever had a maximum of 1.29 million players at one time. It’s sitting at around 700,000 at time of publication.

SteamCharts

Battlegrounds’ rise has been meteoric, to say the least. The game launched in March and quickly became the most-watched game on Twitch. But it didn’t hit 1 million concurrent players until September. The move into China, as well as the launch of the formal 1.0 version of the game, has kicked things into high gear. Just take a look at the data below, organized by SteamSpy.

SteamSpy

It’s also a good moment to take a look at the top 10 games on Steam, as a kind of snapshot of the PC gaming industry. Other titles alongside Battlegrounds include perennial favorites like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, but also Warframe, which has risen from relative obscurity to become a fantastic free-to-play experience on PC. Also up there in the rankings is Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, which has overcome a rocky launch and a poor initial reception among critics, including those here at Polygon.

There’s also two other titles that share some of the same survival game roots as Battlegrounds: Ark: Survival Evolved, which also left early access this year, and Rust, a game that has been in early access since 2013.