‘PUBG’ Breaks 2 Million Concurrent Players, Bluehole Fights To Cope With Flood Of New Players

The runaway success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds continues unabated. Creative Director Brendan Greene revealed Wednesday the Battle Royale shooter has broken a new record with more than 2 million concurrent players. At the same time, the developers at Bluehole are fighting to keep the game’s servers stable and running with the influx of new players.

Steam Store stats show 2,016,359 players playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds(PUBG) at the same time over the past day. This blows away Dota 2 as the previous record holder with just over 1.2 million concurrent players.

To give a further idea of the amazing player count PUBG is currently enjoying, no other Steam title has crossed 1 million concurrent players, per stats collected by SteamDB. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the closest at 854,501 players followed by Fallout 4 with 472,961 players around its release in 2015.

The meteoric rise in PUBG players does not come without additional issues, however. The game has been struggling with the rapid rise in additional players, which Bluehole addressed in an October 3 post on the official website.

The PUBG development team initially designed the game to handle 1 million concurrent users. Bluehole saw the need to begin redesigning the server architecture in June but the rate of new players increased faster than anticipated and caused a spate of connection and server issues. The team is rushing to get new servers online to handle so many after the elusive chicken dinner.

The swelling of the PUBG ranks has also led to other issues. Bluehole has had to delay the leaderboard reset scheduled for Tuesday, October 10 to October 17, per a Steam Community announcement. This is to give the developers time to adjust to the rapid rise in new players and make sure the shooter is on stable ground before bringing the leaderboards back.

The amount of work being put toward handling a huge influx of players brings to question the effect that has towards PUBG making its promised release date by the end of 2017. The game received a minor update at the end of September and the last major update was almost one month ago.

PUBG still has many gameplay optimizations and bug fixes left to go along with introducing major new features like vaulting and 3D replays. Throw in the promise of an Xbox One version of the multiplayer shooter by the end of 2017 and Bluehole has its work cut out for it to meet its obligations.

[Featured Image by Bluehole, Inc]