PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
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PUBG: Battlegrounds enjoyed an explosive rise and rapid fall that few games can match. But despite being far from its heyday, the game still stands as one of the biggest battle royales on the market.
Initially launching in 2017 as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, PUBG laid the framework for the battle royale genre in many ways. Though competitive survival games weren’t new, mechanics like a shrinking play area and air-dropping into the battlefield were popularized in PUBG. The game also took a comparatively realistic approach to its gameplay mechanics, which set it apart from most popular shooters of the day.
So what actually happened to PUBG? And what’s the future of the game at this point?
PUBG booms, becomes biggest game on Steam
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds first launched on PC in March 2017 in early access.
Despite arriving in a pre-launch state, the game saw rapid growth during the year, averaging six-figure player counts by May 2017 and hitting 1 million concurrent players in September. By the time the game was officially released in December 2017, it was averaging over 1.4 million players. In January 2018 it set the Steam record for most concurrent users for any game at 3,236,027 players. That record stands to this day, despite competition from games like Palworld and Black Myth: Wukong.
Despite hitting uniquely high numbers, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds suffered a precipitous fall in player counts throughout 2018. There were numerous reasons for this, foremost among them being a tidal wave of competitors.
In 2017, Epic Games added a battle royale mode to its Fortnite: Save the World cooperative PvE game. Despite being heavily derivative of PUBG, Fortnite: Battle Royale became the king of the genre and eclipsed PlayerUnknown’s Battelgrounds’ popularity. Alongside this, numerous series created battle royale spin-offs of their own, most notably Call of Duty: Warzone and Apex Legends. Games like Battlefield 5 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive also released their own battle royale modes. On top of all this, PUBG found itself competing with its own spin-offs.
PUBG: Mobile eclipses the popularity of original game
Though PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds reached unseen heights before in PC gaming, its mobile spinoff was actually even bigger.
PUBG: Mobile launched in March 2018. Created jointly by PUBG Studios and LightSpeed Studios, it was a booming success across the world, particularly in South Asia and Southeast Asia, being downloaded over 1.3 billion times as of December 2022.
Unlike Fortnite, which is the same game across multiple platforms, PUBG: Mobile is a fully distinct game from the original PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. While Fortnite allowed for cross-play across all platforms and cross-progress for players who used multiple devices, and the mobile version of the game is on an island of its own.
At their core, the games have a similar look and feel. PUBG: Mobile has some significant gameplay differences, however, with different maps and weapons from those seen in the original PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Not only that, but it has original game modes not found in the PC or console versions of the game.
While there is a schism between fans over which is better, there’s no doubt about which was more popular.
PUBG: Mobile was big enough to have been at the center of numerous media campaigns and government sanctions. The game was banned in both India and Bangladesh, and was forced to rebrand and censor some content in China. This forced the game to be re-released in some regions on multiple occasions.
Despite this, PUBG: Mobile has enjoyed overwhelming commercial success, with publisher Krafton stating it had generated over $9 billion in revenue by the end of 2022.
In 2021, PUBG Studios split from LightSpeed to create its own PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds mobile spin-off. While PUBG: Mobile was still actively maintained and remained popular, PUBG: New State was released in 2021 across all major mobile game stores. PUBG: New State has similar gameplay to its sister titles, but with a cyberpunk coat of paint to its characters and environments.
The release of the game confused fans due to the enduring popularity of PUBG: Mobile and largely similar gameplay. PUBG: New State’s key distinction from PUBG: Mobile was that it was developed internally by PUBG Studios and wouldn’t have any revenue sharing with an external developer or publisher.
In 2022, PUBG: New State was rebranded as New State Mobile. Though the game has a working player base, it has fallen far short of the popularity of PUBG: Mobile.
Free-to-play pivot gives PUBG: Battlegrounds a second wind
From December 2017 to December 2018, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds suffered a decline of more than 68% of its player base. The average player count went from 1.44 million to about 474,000 year-over-year.
This decline continued for some time until January 2022, when the game went free-to-play. This led to a short-lived boom that declined over the following months, before trending upwards in 2023 and 2024. That growth continued into 2025 and in March 2025, PUBG: Battlegrounds hit a concurrent player count of 1,329,605, its best figure since July 2018.
Though the game may not be as popular as it once was, PUBG: Battlegrounds remains one of the biggest competitive games online, and all signs point to it enduring for many years to come.