As your game grows and grows, you're going to run into issues. You weren't expecting millions of players so soon (if at all) so you're ill-equipped to combat whatever starts to go wrong. In the case of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, it doesn't seem to matter all that much, but it's certainly having an effect.
Since its Early Access debut back in March, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has sold somewhere in the region of 16 million copies. That was almost two weeks ago. If the current trend has carried on, it could have surpassed 17 million with outlets simply getting tired of the same old headline week after week.
Becoming a massive success in sales means it became the first Steam title to pass 2 million concurrent users. At one point we were all just waiting for it to dethrone Dota 2 at around 1.1 million. That came and went like nothing. After pushing that record-breaking milestone, it looks like things may have finally started to even out, but the reason isn't absolutely clear.
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Rather than growing or decaying, concurrent daily player counts have stayed relatively the same recently. Forums are becoming crowded with players complaining of rampant hacking and Asian players joining EU/US servers, allegedly ruining matches with the increased latency of their distant connections, and there may be reason to believe this is why there's been no noticeable growth over the last week or so. Their 2.289 million concurrent player record hasn't been bested in 9 days.
But while reports state game bans have doubled in recent weeks, the problems still seem rife when it comes to cheating. The issues, combined with the lag imposed on EU/US servers by Asain territories refusing to play on the apparent problematic local servers, mean others have had enough. The numbers haven't exactly dipped, but perhaps the lack of growth is evidence enough. Today's stats place the game at around 100,000 concurrent users below its last record-breaker.
Of course, this could just be a few small cases struggling to dent a multi-million strong playerbase. But is it a case of Western players leaving while Eastern players flock in that's causing the stalemate, or have we finally reached peak PUBG?
