PUBG passes 2 million concurrent players mark

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The most Dota 2 has achieved is 1.3 million.

The rise and rise of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds continues. Last month it smashed the Steam record for the most concurrent players, surpassing Dota 2's previous best of 1.3 million, and today it hit an even bigger milestone: 2 million concurrent users. Staggering.

The Early Access battle royale shooter hit 2,016,498 players earlier today, according to Steam's official stats page. Just under 14 million players are on Steam right now (and today's peak will likely be just above that), which basically means that one in seven users on the platform are locked into PUBG.

The game has also broken the 15 million owners barrier, data from SteamSpy shows, and is well on its way to 16 million. The graph below shows a definite uptick in people buying it over the past few days:

Clearly, the game's recent server troubles and a Stream of negative reviews (prompted by in-game ads for Chinese players) have not been enough to put people off.

Developer Bluehole announced yesterday that the reset of the game's leaderboards, which heralds the start of a new season, would be delayed by a week. The previous season finished yesterday, but the reset won't happen until October 17 because the team are worried about performance issues. Basically, that means the results of any games before then will not be recorded for the leaderboards.

"Our concurrent users have been increasing rapidly, and we are genuinely concerned that we may not be able to provide you with a comfortable and seamless gaming experience by starting the new season immediately," Bluehole said on a Steam post apologising for the delay.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.