Essays 08 May 2023, 11:06

What's the Most Popular Game? List of Most-played Video Games

Call of Duty, Minecraft, or Red Dead Redemption 2? The most popular games in the world are much less obvious than it might seem to regular players.

PUBG

Scale of popularity:

227 million active players per month in early 2018;
600 million downloads of the mobile version.
over 3 million concurrent players on Steam;
PUBG Mobile brought in $1.7 billion in revenue in 2022 (source);
on Steam, an average of 203,000 players per day in March 2023, with a peak of 444.9 thousand. (source).

It all started with a Battle Royale movie-inspired mod for ARMA 2 called DayZ: Battle Royale. It's developer, Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene eventually migrated his work to the engine of ARMA 3 and sparked the interest of Sony, which hired him as a consultant to work on H1Z1. After completing his collaboration, Greene moved to the Korean Studio Bluehole, where he was offered the position of creative director. There, he basically began to create the third iteration of the same game. That's how PUBG was born, which in March 2017 debuted on Steam's early access program as Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. And so the tempest began.

One hundred players dropped on a huge but shrinking map had to get inventory and fight each other until the last man is left standing. The idea caught on like no other before, giving rise to a gargantuan fad. And Playerunknown's Battlegrounds was at the epicenter, generating enormous engagement. The 5 million copies sold within three months after the launch was barely a warm-up - by July 2020, more than 70 million copies of18×16 svg PUBG had been sold.

For a long time, the greatest obstacle preventing Playerunknown's Battlegrounds from becoming really popular was the price threshold. Along with the debut of the free mobile version, however, the situation changed dramatically. PUBG Mobile is adored by fans of interactive entertainment in China and India, and by June 2018, the number of registered players increased to 400 million. In the same month, 87 million online players were registered on the same day, and 227 million during the entire month.

In early 2022, PUBG became free on PC as well. Currently, the game is still doing well – with an average of 180-220 thousand people playing on Steam. At the peak of PUBG's popularity, when the game was still free, it enjoyed over 3.2 million concurrent players.

Learn more about Playerunknown's Battlegrounds

Table of Contents

PUBG