Since January Pubg Has Lost Half Its Active Players

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has lost over half of its active player base since January, when the game was at its peak in terms of popularity.

Dread it, run from it… destiny still arrives. PUBG’s reign couldn’t last forever; in the end, it didn’t even last a year. Now it’s looking like the one-time king of Battle Royale gameplay might be in a nosedive it can’t possibly recover from.

According to SteamCharts, PUBG has gone from an average of 1.5 million players in January of 2018 to just about 850,000 players on average across May. The last time PUBG had so few players was in October of last year while the game was still on its meteoric rise to popularity. Of course, 850,000 players is nothing to sneeze at, but the game’s downward trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all.

May saw the biggest one-month drop yet, and while we’re not saying for sure that it had to with Fortnite’s massive Avengers crossover that saw players becoming Thanos for a limited time, well… let’s just call it a snap judgment.

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Of course, PUBG’s biggest competitor in the Battle Royale scene is Fortnite, a game developed by Epic which originally only featured a PvE mode wherein teams of players build defenses to survive waves of zombies. The team eventually tried adding a Battle Royale mode - complete with the game’s trademark base-building mechanics - and its success was nearly immediate.

Working against PUBG is that Fortnite BR is actually free-to-play, unlike its still-in-development PvE mode. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has an upfront cost, in addition to microtransactions.

Still, if recent news is any indication, only one of these games will make it out of this intense situation. The makers of PUBG are suing Epic Games over copyright infringement, claiming that Epic had stolen PUBG’s ideas for Fortnite. Still, we can’t imagine the bad publicity from trying to sue their rivals into non-existence will do PUBG’s player count any favors.

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