PUBG is Back to 1 Million Active Players

PUBG has defied the assumptions of its inevitable demise. PUBG is back up to 1 mil active players since its sharp decline from 3.2 million in October.

PUBG has been bleeding players since their all time high of 3.2 million. This doesn’t come to much of a surprise to many of us as the continued success of Fortnite as well as the release of other heavy hitters such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 as well as other hopefuls such as Ring of Elysium had all but diminished PUBG’s spotlight since March of 2018 up until November where the wounds seemed visible, and that PUBG was nearing its death.

In November PUBG reached just under 896,000 active players according to Steam charts. While these numbers are somewhat obvious given the atmosphere in the gaming community surrounding PUBG, it does seem that PUBG has defied the assumption that they would be dying, off in a quiet corner somewhere. Not to mention that the current data does not include the console players, although we do expect the trends are similar.

So what has happened? Is PUBG fixed? Well, yes and no.

Much of the recent hype has been from the release of Vikendi, PUBG’s latest snow map that includes the new G36C AR and the use of the snowmobile, both of which have been received positively by players.  When we played it recently, it still seemed incomplete and clunky compared to Black Ops 4 but these recent changes did make us hopeful for PUBG’s future.

With this new map, a new season pass is also available. The new Survivor Pass: Vikendi has proven to be more popular than the previous Sanhok season pass, released earlier this year.

This recent spike is also partly in credit to the fact that PUBG developers greatly improved parachuting mechanics–letting players glide or dive during free fall, also adding the ability to cut your chute before hitting the ground, as well as landing through windows. This may come as a surprise that mechanics like these would be a contributing factor to PUBG’s recent spike in active players but these changes are mechanics that the players have been asking for for months.

While a lot of us in the community have proclaimed the idea of PUBG’s inevitable death in the face of giants such as Fortnite and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, it still has remained Steam’s most popular game through this past year while the mobile version has been incredibly popular in Asia.

While PUBG has still plenty of work to be done to be once again adored by the community, but for now it does seem like PUBG is in the right direction.

What do you think? Is PUBG on its way back into the spotlight or is this the last hurrah? Let us know!