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PUBG concurrent player count almost doubles after free-to-play move

PUBG concurrent player count almost doubles after free-to-play move

Battle royale behemoth PUBG: Battlegrounds has seen its concurrent player figure on Steam go up by almost 100 per cent.

As spotted by Niko Partners' Daniel Ahmad, the title hit a peak of 670,000 users on Steam after its business model changed. That's almost double the concurrent user figure for the previous month; according to SteamCharts, it's 83 per cent higher than the peak of 363,839 simultaneous players that was recorded during December 2021.

Ahmad also notes that there's been a sharp increase in negative reviews on Steam with players complaining about cheaters – a long-standing issue for Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. 

PUBG launched back in March 2017 and to date has attracted more than 70 million players on PC, Xbox and PlayStation platforms.

The title's creative director Dave Curd recently said that PUBG: Battlegrounds' move to a free-to-play business model had nothing to do with other battle royale titles, like Fortnite, Warzone and Apex Legends, who also use the free-to-play model.


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.