Battle royale title Playerunknown's Battlegrounds was propelled out of Early Access this week and this has caused a big boost to Steam's total bandwidth.
As tweeted by creative director Brendan Greene (below), before the final test server update went live, Steam's total bandwidth was a cool 3,000 Gbps, rising to 10,000 Gbps.
When the 1.0 update was rolled out, total bandwidth sat at 5,000, yet quadrupled to 20,000 Gbps in the hours that followed. Steam's Winter Sale might have played a hand in *some* of that traffic, but the lion's share is undoubtedly Playerunknown's Battlegrounds.
As pointed out by the good folks over at PCGamesN, the game has a considerable amount of traffic from Asia. At its peak, that region was behind 15.3 terabytes per second of bandwidth from a total of 22 Tbps.
Our bandwidth usage on @steam_games for the @PUBATTLEGROUNDS 1.0 launch was pretty nuts! The first bump was the final test server update, the second is the 1.0 launch... pic.twitter.com/X2nykzWPUY
— PLAYERUNKNOWN (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) December 21, 2017
In a recent interview, Greene revealed that 60 per cent of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds' userbase was from China. That's almost double the 35 per cent reported earlier in the year.
The game isn't officially out in the region yet, with Tencent snapping up exclusive publishing rights for the country, and is also putting out two mobile editions of the title while it's at it.
That Chinese gamers can play PUBG right now is down to Steam existing in the region in something of a legal grey area. Earlier this week, the Steam Community site was blocked in the country – some concerns were raised that Steam was about to be pulled from China, but having spoken to a few analysts, there's little to suggest this is true. At least, there's no more reason for it to be pulled now than any other point in time.
That said, Tencent has rolled out its WeGame competitor in the region, and if the Chinese tech and entertainment giant wasn't lobbying the powers that be to cut off Steam we would not be surprised in the slightest.
Yesterday, PUBG Corp revealed that Playerunknown's Battlegrounds had been downloaded a massive 30m times across both PC and Xbox One.
