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Playerunknown's Battlegrounds crosses 3m concurrent player barrier

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds crosses 3m concurrent player barrier

Another day, another ridiculous PUBG stat.

The battle royale blockbuster has now been played by more than three million people at the same time, per creative director Brendan Greene on Twitter (below). In fact, at its peak, the title had 3.1m concurrent players.

In September, the title became the title with the highest concurrent player figure on Steam, beating Valve's long-dominant DOTA 2 with a 1.3m peak concurrent player count.

As the game rolled out of Early Access in its 1.0 state - as well as launching on to Xbox One - developer and publisher PUBG Corp announced the title had been downloaded more than 30m times since its March 2017 release date. That was just under two weeks ago, meaning that the game has likely sold in the region of 32m copies at this point.

In a recent interview with Invenglobal, PUBG Corp CEO Chang Han Kim said that the team had put a considerable amount of effort into stopping cheaters in their tracks since 1.0's launch, with the number of players banned for such offences dropping considerably.

"We had a talk about this with Tencent, the publisher of the service in China, and they said that it will be an everlasting fight," he said.

"Like you said, it’s impossible to eliminate hacks completely. However, we’ve put so much effort into banning cheaters, and the number of cheaters after the launch of the 1.0 version has dropped significantly as a result. We can see the drop in the number of cheaters and we’ll share the data with the community in the near future.

"We are currently running two anti-hack software simultaneously, and assigned staff for monitoring in the night time as well. We also run the encoding process in order to prevent any attack no the client. In addition to that, we’ll improve the death cam system so that players will be able to tell if the opponent really is a skilled person or a cheater."

Earlier in the year, PUBG's anti-cheating partner BattlEye reported that it was having to ban thousands of players for using hacks and cheats. 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.