PUBG sales reach 30 million, but player numbers continue to decline

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has reached a new sales milestone, with over 30 million copies sold.

Unfortunately, and though PUBG sales continue to grow (30 million, per Steam Spy), player numbers are dropping. We first reported last week that the game had registered its first decline in concurrent player numbers.

The drop was around 2% compared to 30 days earlier, and it has now gone up to 5%, according to Steam Charts.

For a better idea of how this affects the game's peak numbers, take a look at the chart below from SteamDB. Mid-January was PUBG's most recent player record, at 3.257 million players.

Since then, the decline started and the numbers have been going down ever since. There's been a few upticks here and there, but nothing managed to reach that figure, and the drops are becoming more severe.

Bloomberg reporter Yuji Nakamura‏ first pointed out this decline on Twitter, adding that developer Bluehole still isn't taking cheaters seriously.

For its part, Bluehole recently implemented new anti-cheat tech, and now has a team dedicated to studying and banning cheats. The developer also promised to share an update about its roadmap for early 2018 soon.

It's important to point out that although these declines are real, and are more than likely the result of more than one cause, PUBG still dominates Steam's most played games. Even at its lowest player count every day, it still manages to have more players than the top ten combined.