Best of the Year: PUBG stays above two million players on Steam
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (better known as PUBG) has been a revolution in the multiplayer online gaming scene and remains stable with more than 2 million simultaneous players.
For those not familiar with PUBG, it is a multiplayer shooter with up to 100 simultaneous players immersed in a battle royale competition format. It presents a map whose playing area is progressively reduced and in which the objective happens to be the last survivor (let's talk about a player or a team). Its success has been impepinable: on February 16, Steam confirmed that the title of Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene has sold 30 million copies.
Despite the spectacular sales, this game stands out even more for having displaced two sacred cows from the list of most played Steam as are Dota 2 and Counter Strike, and has done so far behind the figures of these two titles of Valve (company that owns Steam), which speaks a lot and good about PUBG. At the time of writing these lines, its most immediate pursuers total 420,352 and 243,903 players online, while PUBG exceeds 2,128,300, with a peak of 2,316,442 on the day.
What has become a new digital version of the format popularized by the film (and before novel) Battle Royale in the multiplayer phenomenon that sweeps around the world? The answer is complicated; There may even be no answer ... Sometimes, small changes in the dynamics, small variations in the distribution of weights, which catalyze the success of a game. History has given us many examples of this, starting with the success of the European roulette of the Blanc brothers. Brendan Greene also has that great touch that dazzles the audience.
We are talking about a leisure product that, according to Steam statistics, is capable of gathering more than 3 million players playing simultaneously on its servers. It is the largest phenomenon that has this distribution platform and digital game. We are going to give another figure: the highest peak of Dota 2 players in history, a game that, you have to remember, is free, it is at 1,291,328. PUBG has reached 3,080,769 in just one year since the launch of its Early Access. And its expansion in consoles is also unstoppable: in less than 48 hours it sent a million copies.
But will these figures continue to grow in the coming months? How will it resist the exit of new competitors that try to exploit the same format? Some point to an ominous future for PUBG if it does not start introducing new developments and proposals that maintain the interest of the players (although the CS franchise has been pointing out for years that the important thing for an online title to maintain its success lies simply and mechanically. of fun games and with sufficient depth to make room for the development of the community).
It must be recognized that the reasons that the most soothsayers wield do not completely lack meaning: the Fortnite user park, free to play with an attractive cartoon aesthetic that aesthetically distances it from Battlegrounds, continues to grow, and the output of new products from the franchise, exclusively for the Chinese market and distributed by the communication giant Tascent, could reduce the number of regular users in the desktop version of PUBG, by diversifying products and launching mobile-only versions with enough quality and content to satisfy the most casual players.
Anyway, PUBG still has a lot of space to exploit in its marketing space, especially now that it has been out of the early access stage for a couple of months, a stage that some prefer to dodge to avoid suffering the mistakes of a game in development .
