Playerunknown's Battlegrounds Sets a Record of 3M Concurrent Players on Steam

DooKey

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PUBG has set a new record of 3M concurrent players on Steam. However, to further put this number in perspective, 1.5M bans have been handed out since it's been out. I can't believe how popular it is and it just keeps growing and growing. However, I haven't tried it, but I'll give it shot sometime when it's polished up. Tell me about your experiences now that it's overrun with players. Check out the tweet from Steam about the number of players.

Alongside the concurrent player record it's hit another, more worrisome milestone: 1.5 million players banned. Cheating has been a problem for a long time in PUBG and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.
 
Half of them are cheating.

Could be more than 1/2 that are cheating, there is no way to really tell. 1.5M banned is arbitrary as we don't know the total player base. It does mean that are 1/2 as many banned as there are playing at one time though.
 
Could be more than 1/2 that are cheating, there is no way to really tell. But technically there is 1/3 of the player base as confirmed cheaters... 1.5M banned + 3M online = 4.5M total players 1.5M / 4.5M = 1/3.
Quite inaccurate, as total sales are way past 20 million.
 
Quite inaccurate, as total sales are way past 20 million.

Yup, you ninja'ed me. Thought about it for a sec and knew that didn't make sense either.

I have to wonder what kind of model attracts that many cheaters to the game though. I suppose it's really not that high as a percentage though. 1.5M out of 20M copies would only be 7.5% of copies sold as confirmed cheaters.
 
with another 10m not confirmed yet :) so many random fly hackers and people that just spray walls from a mile out thinking your head is visible :/ I have played it quite a bit and it is fun as long as you dont run in to cheaters, which i just dont understand in a game like that. Its not like you get anything for cheating. woohoo leaderboard stats that get reset all the time
 
Anybody else getting tired of hearing about the game? Not singling out hardocp, but every day on multiple sites (even facebook) there are articles about this highly overrated game.

I've only put about 50 hours into it, and it's not a bad game, but I just don't see the appeal of spending 20 minutes gearing up only to be one shotted by some camper, lucky shot, or cheater.
 
with another 10m not confirmed yet :) so many random fly hackers and people that just spray walls from a mile out thinking your head is visible :/ I have played it quite a bit and it is fun as long as you dont run in to cheaters, which i just dont understand in a game like that. Its not like you get anything for cheating. woohoo leaderboard stats that get reset all the time
Actually, they do get things for cheating and winning hence the mass of Chinese. They get loot boxes and sometimes those boxes have virtual clothing worth real world money.

Take out the loot and real world money transactions, and watch the cheating die down considerably.
 
Actually, they do get things for cheating and winning hence the mass of Chinese. They get loot boxes and sometimes those boxes have virtual clothing worth real world money.

Take out the loot and real world money transactions, and watch the cheating die down considerably.
oh yeah i forgot about that crap since i get the same pair of pants everytime i open one :/
 
Anybody else getting tired of hearing about the game? Not singling out hardocp, but every day on multiple sites (even facebook) there are articles about this highly overrated game.

I've only put about 50 hours into it, and it's not a bad game, but I just don't see the appeal of spending 20 minutes gearing up only to be one shotted by some camper, lucky shot, or cheater.

Spend less time on Facebook then?
 
You can't see the numbers but fortnight, the pubg clone that threw away their entire game focus to 100% copy the competition is getting close to the same numbers.
 
You can't see the numbers but fortnight, the pubg clone that threw away their entire game focus to 100% copy the competition is getting close to the same numbers.
I would think so since its also Free to play easier to get people to try
 
I play it casually with Friends or alone. It really helps to get a shot of adrenaline after long working day :)
 
Competition attracts cheating typically. No one is cheating at Zelda Breath of the Wild.

I can agree with you partially, but I hacked and cheated my Zelda Cemu game so that I could use the Amiibos. Sorry to ruin your good example, but still the basis was sound.
 
Anybody else getting tired of hearing about the game? Not singling out hardocp, but every day on multiple sites (even facebook) there are articles about this highly overrated game.

I've only put about 50 hours into it, and it's not a bad game, but I just don't see the appeal of spending 20 minutes gearing up only to be one shotted by some camper, lucky shot, or cheater.
I was just out getting some lunch and over heard 2 people talking about how awesome this game was.
 
It is fun if you dont have to deal with cheaters or random ass RNG like terrible loot spawns where you go through 5 houses to get one pistol
 
All of this and no one has said what PUBG is.. Let me try guessing:
Panda Underground Bus Gala
Portly Unwashed Bumbling Gamers
Public Urinating Behind Grandma's

I guess if 3 million people play it, that means all 2 billion on the internet should know what it is magically..
 
Unless they have a good single player, I don't buy these games.
YHE9RNy.jpg

Fortnite, Overwatch and Destiny 2 aren't on this list. More games need to use lawyers as an anti-cheat.
 
Why is DOOM on your list? No one bought that game for the multi, it was for the awesome single player experience.
 
I haven't played with that many cheaters lately. BattleEye has helped out a ton.
 
I was close to buying this game but then all i hear about is the amount of cheaters.. is it that bad?
 
Unless they have a good single player, I don't buy these games.
YHE9RNy.jpg

Fortnite, Overwatch and Destiny 2 aren't on this list. More games need to use lawyers as an anti-cheat.

Why is Battlefront in there since it doesn’t have a real single player campaign?
 
To preface I see PUBG as the new Counter Strike, it has all the hallmarks of the characteristics that made CS so popular back in the day. TLDR, pubg is not going anywhere its the next mega game genre and it will hold this position for a while. 5 years approximately.

Could be more than 1/2 that are cheating, there is no way to really tell. 1.5M banned is arbitrary as we don't know the total player base. It does mean that are 1/2 as many banned as there are playing at one time though.
More than 15 million copies have been sold as of sept so we can assume that is less than 10% of the population since the total sales are higher. Some quote 26 million sold.

Also cheaters, or criminals are usually a small number of the population doing a lot of crime. So the cheaters, they cheat, if they get banned they buy a new copy but only a very small number of them actually quit if they get caught. They buy multiple copies to smurf, etc... I am not saying that its not a problem but assuming half of everyone playing is cheating is very unlikely to be accurate. I have played enough pubg to know that 50% of the players are way too bad and unlucky to actually be hacking. And those 1.5 million bans could be the same person getting banned multiple times. Lots of variables to play with here creating a huge amount of uncertainty. You can say a lot of numbers and I will not balk but 50% is just too far.





Competition attracts cheating typically. No one is cheating at Zelda Breath of the Wild.
There are many reasons people cheat, competition is also a very broadly defined subject. I have seen people cheat at all levels of competition and in the smallest games. The mere fact you are playing a game other people play is creates competition even in single player games. What makes cheating get big in a game is more than that. You don't hear about nearly as much cheating in other big competitive games like say overwatch. You don't run into as many cheaters either. The reason is because the fundamental skills and game play don't push people emotionally to cheat as much.

Anybody else getting tired of hearing about the game? Not singling out hardocp, but every day on multiple sites (even facebook) there are articles about this highly overrated game.

I've only put about 50 hours into it, and it's not a bad game, but I just don't see the appeal of spending 20 minutes gearing up only to be one shotted by some camper, lucky shot, or cheater.

I once made the same argument about counter strike,. I don't see the appeal of spending 20 seconds gearing up, and another 30 getting into place only to get a random lucky shot in the head from some unintuitive spray pattern then waiting 2 minutes to get back in and play again. But it quickly became the most popular game in the world at the time and reshaped my thinking about what humans really want out of entertainment. PUBG takes this to the next level, more randomness, more time setting up, more variability. One way to look at it is this. as long as luck plays a major factor in a games outcome, people whom are addicted gamblers (cause that is what our brains are largely wired to do) at heart will always be able to rationalize in their own head why they lost every time they lost, and by rationalize they self validate and doing so never allows them to feel like wow I just lost because I suck or because this game is just plain not fit for competition and skill. And since they don't get that feeling they play longer and more trying to get luck on their side, now of course when luck goes their way they chalk it up to, that's how good I am! Go the opposite way and look at a game like quake, its freaking dead, but there is much less randomness about it outside of player spawns. Powerups spawn at certain times, powerful weapons shoot exactly where you aim them in predictable ways. The best players are so far above others that you very quickly realize you are outclassed and only the most determined of players stay past the initial beat down. best irony of it all, CSGO skins turned into gambling which is also a hugely successful endeavor for CSGO and the gambling sites. What a surprise a game with a huge component of random gambling finds more money in gambling itself. PUBG follows suit and PUBG gets the advantage of being a new game this does a small reset on everyones skill. Go play CS not and its annoying, the players who have been playing for 10+ years know every triange of every surface on every map and every angle, because that's what they have to do to make up for the random nature of the game. PUBG gives them all a reset which allows new players to feel better and have a little more success early on.

CS became the mega game it was because millions of people were getting on the internet at the time and going up against the DM games of the day which had established high skilled players. They had crappy integrated graphics, couldn't even move and were expected to compete against people whom had mastered unintuitive time consuming skills like bunny hopping. Then CS is there, 1 lucky shot to the head at 15 fps and you can have a kill too! This catered to the novice population and the game exploded. PUBG IMO is riding the same trajectory. You have existing games with overly skilled player bases and you have a new influx of hundreds of millions of gamers, coming from China, and Asia, as well as console players whom are now old enough to own PCs. PUBG is the perfect game for them to jump in, have some limited success and not feel like they don't stand a chance. A lucky drop could net you a great gun, and you could see a random pro running along who doesn't see you and head shot them in the early game. Or you could just hide and not even engage anyone and the luck of the circles could get you a high finish.


You can't see the numbers but fortnight, the pubg clone that threw away their entire game focus to 100% copy the competition is getting close to the same numbers.
How do you know its getting the same numbers if you cant see the numbers? I am asking for some citations or something.

Insurgency Sandstorm will take over PUBG

with another 10m not confirmed yet :) so many random fly hackers and people that just spray walls from a mile out thinking your head is visible :/ I have played it quite a bit and it is fun as long as you dont run in to cheaters, which i just dont understand in a game like that. Its not like you get anything for cheating. woohoo leaderboard stats that get reset all the time

There are a lot of reasons people cheat and you don't need much to get them going. But IME the biggest factors that increase cheating are:
Randomness, like random spray patterns in guns like counterstrike the original mega cheater game. High penalties for death, look you die once you are out in both CS and PUBG, a single headshot can end it all. Where you spawn, what items you get determines winners and losers. Cheats help you sneak a little extra just when you need it. Or they let you rage hack and troll everyone else.
It is fun if you dont have to deal with cheaters or random ass RNG like terrible loot spawns where you go through 5 houses to get one pistol

See my reply to HorseproofBacon for half of a response, the other is the last reply to you. The game is entirely based on RNG, so complaining about it is like complaining about the entire existence of the game, then turning around and saying oh its great. Now here's the kicker in my years of playing I have noticed one very clear trend in video games, the more emphasis you put on random events, the more people cheat. So the RNG which is the essence of this game that you hate is the one of the big factors causing cheating. yet you still play a game that is defined by the 2 things you claim are bad about it. Now you go up and see you are psychologically programmed to like what you hate. This is why companies cant listen to their customers, their customers will tell them one thing, then their actions will show something else.
 
See my reply to HorseproofBacon for half of a response, the other is the last reply to you. The game is entirely based on RNG, so complaining about it is like complaining about the entire existence of the game, then turning around and saying oh its great. Now here's the kicker in my years of playing I have noticed one very clear trend in video games, the more emphasis you put on random events, the more people cheat. So the RNG which is the essence of this game that you hate is the one of the big factors causing cheating. yet you still play a game that is defined by the 2 things you claim are bad about it. Now you go up and see you are psychologically programmed to like what you hate. This is why companies cant listen to their customers, their customers will tell them one thing, then their actions will show something else.

I mean i know its all random but they could up the rate of spawns, I am not saying to take all of the RNG out just spawn a tad bit more guns
 
How do you know its getting the same numbers if you cant see the numbers? I am asking for some citations or something.

Yeah Epic released a statement regarding their success in early December, I'm not sure what the numbers are at currently but based on the increase in twitch viewership (almost on par with pubg now) it wouldn't be a long shot to say they are catching up.

Fortnight is sitting at over 30 million accounts (yes some of those are duplicates since you don't have to pay 30$ for the game, making PUBGs numbers so much more impressive.

Fortnight went from 800,000 concurrent users at the start of November to 1.3m concurrent users at the beginning of December. That's a pretty good increase over that period. You could probably name on 1 hand how many games have 1m concurrent users that aren't foreign language mmorpg types.

I'm not saying one game or the other is better, but for fortnight, which was salvaged from a dumpster fire to golaith status by throwing out their original game, and just copy and pasting the PUBG gametype, it's pretty impressive. Too bad Epic ruined paragon, now that was a good pc forward game back in alpha, before they scrapped the whole project and remade a trash lowest common denominator brawler. In the future we will all just play one game type over and over forever apparently.
 
Just don't see the rave about this game. I bought it for my grandson who played it all of one hour. $30 down the drain on that one. My daughter on the other hand loves it and plays the shit out of it. I tried it and didn't like it at all. Looked pretty good but I didn't like the gaming and lost interest quickly. I'm not at all a multiplayer guy so maybe I'm a bit (quite a bit actually) biased. This game just didn't cut it for me.
 
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