Despite Player Decline, PUBG Isn't Doomed

This week, portions of the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds community whipped themselves into a tizzy over charts showing that the game’s active player base has been in decline since mid-January. This comes amidst a backdrop of growing dissatisfaction with the game.

Sites like SteamDB and Steam Charts, which derive their numbers from publicly-available Steam data, show that PUBG has gone from steadily rising numbers of concurrent players since early last year to a pronounced decline this month. Yesterday, for example, both sites say the game drew an average of around 1.7 million concurrent players, down from the 2.5-3 million range it’s been pulling since November 2017. While the game has seen similar dips in numbers before, those lasted just a couple days. Yesterday’s lows come after nearly a month of slow decline, with the last week seeing a particularly pronounced drop.

Some players, incensed over continued cheating problems as well as technical issues, have taken the waning player base as a sign that the PUBG Corporation is finally reaping what it’s sown. “Bluehole has been completely silent and gone back on their word many times,” reads a popular post on Reddit about the player count drop. “Poor servers, poor programming, constant maintenance... I’m glad this game will finally get treated on how they have been treating the fanbase, being lazy and silent.”A similar thread on PUBG’s official forums, meanwhile, suggests that players are bored due to a lack of substantial new content since the game’s release. “There have been no major game updates to keep the game fresh compared to a game like Fortnite which receives an update every week or two with hundreds of changes included in each update,” reads the first post in the thread. “I also feel like there isn’t enough communication between the players and the developers.”

Then there’s the game’s Steam forum, which, these days, read like one long, uninterrupted rant about cheaters. One of the first people to call attention to the player count drop, Bloomberg tech reporter Yuji Nakamura, also pinned the blame on PUBG Corp’s handling of cheaters, hackers, and ne’er-do-wells.

Source :-  kotaku