Brendan Greene’s battle royale, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, overtakes Fallout 4 as the most-played game not published by Valve.
There are all sorts of stats on Steam – publicly available from sites like SteamSpy or SteamDB – that tell you many interesting things.
There are also many articles based on these stats that tell you things of varying voracity. A post on total money made, for example, might be calculated based on the total sales of the game; this doesn’t take into account games bought on sale, refunds, and other variance. Basically if you’ve not had it corroborated by an inside source, like a publisher, take it with a pinch of salt.
But one stat you can hang your hat on is the concurrent players figure. This literally tells you how many people were running the game at any one time, and the peak concurrent players figure tells you what a game’s record concurrency figure is. And Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds just knocked a big name off that particular chart.
Here’s the chart as it stands at the time of writing:
- Dota 2 – 1,295,114
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – 854,801
- Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds – 481,304
- Fallout 4 – 472,962
- Grand Theft Auto V – 364,548
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – 287,411
- Payday 2 – 247,709
- No Man’s Sky – 212,613
- Counter-Strike – 192,924
- Sid Meier’s Civilization VI – 162,657
Source: SteamDB
That’s Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds overtaking the enormously popular Fallout 4 into third place, and that’s huge. With that tally of almost half a million concurrent players, it also makes PUBG the highest non-Valve game (in peak concurrency terms) that Steam has ever seen.
Admittedly Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is still a fair ways in front, at a smidge over 850,000 concurrent players at its peak – and Dota 2 is probably unassailable in its top spot – but that’s still a massive step for PUBG.
And let’s not forget that it’s still in Early Access; Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is moving past the ‘flash in the pan’ stage, and into a veritable phenomenon with real staying power.
Flash in the pan, geddit? We’ll see ourselves out.
Original source: Brendan ‘Playerunknown’ Greene via Twitter