PUBG: Battlegrounds - the game formerly known as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds - still holds the record for the biggest concurrent player count ever registered on Steam. It remains one of the biggest games on the platform, but it's nowhere near those early heights, even after going free-to-play. That's just a question of perspective, though, as the newly-relaunched game has reached well over a half-million concurrent players.
After its free-to-play launch today, PUBG reached a peak concurrent player count of 668,706, as SteamDB shows. That makes it the second-biggest game on Steam today (just behind Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), and would make it the sixth-biggest Steam game of all time, behind New World, Cyberpunk 2077, Dota 2, CS:GO, and, er, itself.
PUBG previously hit a peak of 3,257,248 players in January 2018, shortly after its 1.0 launch. That remains an astronomical, seemingly-untouchable record on Steam. Only three other Steam games - Cyberpunk, Dota, and CS:GO - have topped a million players, and PUBG is the only game to top two million, much less three.
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Earlier today, PUBG: Battlegrounds went fully free-to-play - and the effects are already being felt. While we can't see any data on how it's performing on consoles just yet, its Steam player count has increased significantly.
According to data from Steam Charts, PUBG's player count quickly surpassed the peaks of the days leading up to the free-to-play update and has climbed to a peak of 667,000 players today. This is the highest that PUBG's Steam player count has been for since May 2020.
PUBG's shift to a free-to-play model brings it in line with some of its main battle royale rivals, such as Call of Duty Warzone and Apex Legends. All players will now be able to get a Basic PUBG account for free, which grants you access to most of the game's content. Existing players that had previously bought the game have been automatically upgraded to a BATTLEGROUNDS Plus account, which has access to all content and the game's ranked mode. New players can pay a one-time fee of $12.99 to upgrade to a Battlegrounds Plus account if they want to try and climb the PUBG ranks.
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Seminal battle royale shooter Playerunknown's Battlegrounds is now free-to-play, inviting all stag and hen parties to parachute into holiday resorts for paintballing which accidentally uses real guns. Folks who previously paid for PUBG: Battlegrounds (the new-ish official name replacing Plunkbat) have been grandfathered into the new Battlegrounds Plus account tier and receive receive some edgy virtual clothes too. Everyone else, hey, in you come.
