China is the biggest audience for PUBG, who'd have guessed?

China is the biggest audience for PUBG, who'd have guessed?

There's a reason you come across so many Chinese players in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and it's not just because the developer refuses to implement proper region locking. It's because Chinese gamers play more than twice the amount of PUBG as their U.S. counterparts.

These stats come from another chat at last week's GDC, where Steam Spy owner, Sergey Galyonkin highlighted that the average Chinese PUBG gamer will spend as many as 16 hours a week gaming, whereas that average was around seven hours for most US players.

That average is certainly raised by the fact that there are many more Chinese Battlegrounds players than anywhere else in the world. Much like vogue games of years gone by, like the original DOTA, followed by League of Legends and so on, PUBG has attracted enormous attention in China and more than 78 percent of all Chinese Steam gamers now own it.

As PCGamer points out however, there is some discrepancy to the data that should be considered. It's possible that the internet cafe culture of China means that players are gaming away on the same Steam accounts, which would certainly raise the average playtime per account up. Steam Spy data is also not acquired directly from Steam, but through Vale's own Web API, so it's possible that the stats are a little skewed in some cases.

Still, PUBG is exceedingly popular in China and there appears to be no stopping it, even if Fortnite is swiftly growing to be the more popular of the two.