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Report: Playerbase of H1Z1 battle royale mode King of the Kill down 91 per cent from peak

Report: Playerbase of H1Z1 battle royale mode King of the Kill down 91 per cent from peak

Battle royale might be booming for Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite but the genre original H1Z1 is not faring quite as well.

Data from Githyp shows that the game's playerbase has dropped almost 91 per cent from a high back in July 2017. The site reports that at its best, the game was the third most played game on Steam, with a peak concurrent player count of 150,000 people. Keep in mind this was before PUBG came along and smashed DOTA 2's two million peak.

Today, the game struggles to enter the Top 50 games on Steam, with less than 10,000 concurrent players on a daily basis.

This provides a useful lesson for companies looking to get into the battle royale genre on the back of PUBG and Fortnite's success - just because some companies are doing well doesn't mean everyone will.

It also shows one of the dangers of Early Access - that interest in your game might wane before it is even finished. When it was released, King of the Kill was competing with survival games like DayZ for attention - what made it was unique was torpedoed by Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, a game by the man who licensed out his version of the battle royale game mode to developer Daybreak Game Company.

H1Z1 launched back in 2015 with a survival element and a battle royale component. In February 2016, these were split into two separate games - H1Z1: Just Survive and H1Z1: King of the Kill.

Last year, these were split even further, with Just Survive ditching the H1Z1 branding.


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.