It wasn't long ago that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was all anyone would talk about when it came to battle royale. While the once user-mod, now full-fledged game is the pioneer of the genre, many developers put their own spin on battle royale, and as a result PUBG's playerbase dwindled considerably.

The downward trend, however, has been halted for the time being. PlayerUnknown's Battleground is seeing an upward trend in concurrent players for the first time in nearly 10 months, returning to the 1 million concurrent players mark.

Most of the downward trend this year has been due to the success of Epic Games' Fortnite and perhaps the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's Blackout mode as well. There are also numerous PUBG clones on the mobile market that may have chipped away at the game's playerbase.

The drop off since the beginning of 2018 is a staggering one when looking at the numbers from Steam. At the start of the year, PUBG had surpassed the 3 million concurrent players peak, passing Dota 2's record for active users in the process. Since January however, things started to wind down, and just last month PUBG failed to surpass the 1 million players peak, topping out at just under 900,000 users.

But what reason could there be for people to suddenly want to jump back into PUBG? For starters, many who converted over to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's Blackout mode may have had their fill and are wanting to give PUBG another chance. Also, developer PUBG Corp announced test servers were live for the new Vikendi map a few weeks ago during The Game Awards, giving players good reason to jump back in to try out the new location. Not to mention the game recently launched on the PS4 as well, growing its potential audience considerably.

Whether or not PUBG can continue this upward trend remains to be seen, but things are looking bright for the battle royale game.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is out now for iOS, Android, PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Source: BleedingCool