PUBG hits 3 million concurrent players (and 1.5 million cheater bans)

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The next highest game is Dota 2 with 1.29 million.

It was inevitable, wasn't it? PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds keeps blasting through milestones for concurrent players: in September it was 1 million, in October it was double that and now, following its Early Access exit, it's hit the three million mark. To put that in perspective, the next highest game, Dota 2, has a record of 1.29 million (although it hasn't broken 1 million since February).

I did read a few headlines earlier this month claiming PUBG had already reached three million, but it turns out they were wrong (and that there were a few fake charts floating around). SteamDB confirmed the achievement earlier today on its Twitter account, and Steam's official stats page is also showing today's peak players at 3,106,358.

The question now is: how high can it go? I suppose numbers are likely to be inflated right now because lots of people have time off of work and school. And as you can tell by the time gaps between the million milestones, its growth is definitely slowing. But I'd be surprised if player numbers tailed off anytime soon. What's the ceiling? 3.5 million? 4 million? (Whisper it) 5 million? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Alongside the concurrent player record it's hit another, more worrisome milestone: 1.5 million players banned. Cheating has been a problem for a long time in PUBG and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. Admittedly, I don't see many hackers in game (perhaps I'm not good enough to get matched with them...), but I see a lot of other players posting videos of cheaters slithering around in the prone position faster than you can normally sprint.

The number of bans was confirmed by BattlEye, the game's anti-cheat service.

The development team promised to do more to combat hacking back in November, saying that it was rolling out new methods for catching cheaters. Clearly, whatever it did was not enough, and if there's anything that could hold back the game then constantly coming up against hackers is it.

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.