PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds beats out Dota 2 to top Steam concurrent list, is 2017's single-platform bestseller
PlayerUnknown's battlegrounds has won 2017, in case you're wondering why nobody can shut up about it.
Two more milestones added to the glory of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds this weekend.
The first was topping Steam's concurrent player charts. This is an enormous feat, as knocking Dota 2 off that perch is a rare occurrence indeed, and even big triple-A titles rarely manage it.
PlayerUnknown himself celebrated the milestone by on Twitter screengrabbing Steam's statistics page for prosperity. There it is with 877,844 players all logged in at once, while Dota 2 sulks just beneath it with a daily peak of 842,919.
The other milestone pertains to sales, and was shared by Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners. According to the analyst, who can draw on resources like the NPD's full data, PUBG is the best-selling single-platform title of 2017 to date.
The key here is the "single-platform" bit. Games that have released on more than one platform have sold more copies across their full range (notably Ghost Recon Wildlands, for example), but with at least 7 million sales PUBG is the best on just one.
We expect to see PUBG do even better when it releases on Xbox One. It seemed like an of-the-moment craze when it first popped up, and we did wonder whether it would hold up by the time it made it to console, but it's really starting to look like a stayer - especially as developer Bluehole seem intent on actually getting it out the door, unlike so many of the games in its immediate family.
Well, we'll see whether release season changes anything or if it'll be all PUBG, all the time from here.