PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has just crossed a huge threshold by selling more than 30 million copies. That continues its run as not only one of the most popular new games of the last year, but one of the most popular games of all time. However, not all is well in the paradise of Erangel, as it turns out Battlegrounds has lost a further five percent of its user base in the past month alone.
While five percent might not be a sizeable amount for most games, it's even more problematic for a title like Battlegrounds. When you have tens of millions of players, five percent represents hundreds of thousands of players.
With stats put together by Kotaku, this suggests that as much as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is still a hugely popular title, it may be losing ground to the extreme success of free to play alternative, Fortnite, which Epic Games repurposed into a Battle Royale game following Battlegrounds' success.
It may also be an indication that as with many other Battle Royale or sandbox shooter games of recent years -- DayZ, H1Z1, Seven Days to Die and many others -- that these games modes only attract a user base for so long. Gamers blow through all of the available content in a year or so and then begin to move on to something else.
That's not the end of the world when you still have tens of millions of players, but it perhaps suggests that these sort of vogue genre titles don't have the staying power of other titles and genres which seem to attract smaller, but more dedicated player bases.
Are you guys still playing Battlegrounds?
