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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Hits Three Million Concurrent Players (And Half As Many Bans)
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the battle royale game that has taken the world by storm, hits a new milestone with three million concurrent players on PC alone.
Now that the game has officially exited Early Access on Steam, it makes sense that its numbers would jump up. In September, the numbers exceeded Dota 2's at one million. In October, they exceeded two million. Now, with a new map and vaulting, the game number of players tops three million.
These numbers has been floating around for a while, but were proven fake before today. SteamDB confirmed the actual milestone on twitter.
A more concerning milestone, however, comes from anti-cheat service BattlEye, which announced that 1.5 million accounts have been banned from Battlegrounds. Of the approximately 26,370,071 owners, that means 5.688266823399907% of the player base has been banned from the game for cheating or abusive behavior.
Our Take
As PUBG's popularity raises, presumably the ban number will also raise proportionally. It will be interesting to see if it can break that dynamic at any point.
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