'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' sets new Steam concurrent user record with over 1.5 million players
The first person battle royale video game "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" continues to rise in popularity, even though it is still in its early access phase. The game recently surpassed 1.52 million concurrent users on Steam.
The shooter's new record broke the 1.29 million users that "Dota 2" recorded back in March 2016. This is impressive considering "Dota 2" is a free-to-play game and "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" is a paid game. The two titles are the only games to ever cross the one million mark so far.
In the all-time top records of peak concurrent users, "Counter Strike: Global Offensive" came third with over 850,000 users, followed by "Fallout 4" with over 470,000 and "Grand Theft Auto V" with 360,000.
With the "Battlegrounds" players, the PC gaming platform Steam itself reached a new milestone by having over 15 million users online at the same time. Earlier this year, the 14 million record for concurrent users was broken. In contrast, in 2012 the record for online users was only six million. This showed a rapid growth in PC gamers over the past few years.
With "Battlegrounds" performing very well, the titular PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, shared his thoughts in a Reddit "Ask-Me-Anything" session. He said he would love to add a single-player option to the game, but it might not happen soon.
Understandably, he and developer Blue Hole are very busy supporting the PC version and developing the upcoming Xbox One version of the game.
"I would love to add a single-player campaign to the game," he wrote on Reddit. "I think the island we have could be a great location for an interesting story, but unfortunately we just don't have the time or the resources for this at the moment!"
Greene also gave players a glimpse of a new vehicle that is being added to the game, a van that looks like the retro Volkswagen. The van is only one of the three vehicles that the team is currently working on.
