PUBG Crosses 10 Million Sold Mark While In Early Access
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is quickly enjoying Minecraft levels of success. Creative Director Brendan Greene announced Tuesday the Battle Royale shooter has already reached 10 million copies sold since releasing to Steam Early Access in March.
“10 MILLION SOLD!” the PUBG Creative Director declared on Twitter. “Never did I think we would reach such a number! Thank you all for your continuing support of the @PUBATTLEGROUNDS team.”
There are no official numbers, but a Wikipedia entry used to keep track of the best-selling PC games of all time puts PUBG as the top-selling shooter of all time and tied for seventh place with the venerable Garry’s Mod and RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. Meanwhile, Minecraft sits at 26 million sold, with Terrarria behind it at 20 million.
The rapid success of the PUBG is due in large part to the development team at Bluehole successfully engaging the streaming community. This caused the game to quickly go viral at launch, which resulted in huge sales from the beginning.
Today, PUBG sits at an active player base hovering around the 600,000 to 700,000 mark at any point in time, per Steam Charts. Meanwhile, the peak number of concurrent players fell just short of the one million milestone at 960,950. That puts PUBG in second place behind the current record holder, Dota 2 at 1.2 million concurrent players.
The good news for Bluehole is PUBG has nowhere to go but up from here. The official launch of the shooter will not come until later this fall, and there are two additional maps currently in development. Meanwhile, the in-game items have turned into a huge success for the studio, and paid micro-transactions were tested out recently during Gamescom.
These loot crates come with cosmetic items for PUBG players to customize their character. Many of these items end up on the Steam Marketplace for sale.
Another growth area for PUBG will be additional platforms. Bluehole recently signed a publishing partnership deal with Microsoft to make the game exclusive to the Xbox One at launch. This timed exclusivity arrangement guarantees Microsoft’s console will receive the game this year. That’s a boon to both parties as a drought of exclusives on the Xbox One, combined with the viral popularity of PUBG, points to a potentially huge console launch.
Are you one of the 10 million who have jumped into PUBG? Sound off in the comments below.
[Featured Image by Bluehole Inc.]
