H1Z1: King of the Kill grows playerbase 1000% in six months after a big update

H1Z1: King of the Kill, Daybreak Games’ competitive survival shooter, has wrestled its way back towards the top of Steam’s most-played charts after six months which has seen the player base grow 1000%.

That’s according to analytics site GitHyp, which states H1Z1: KOTK currently has 80,399 players, putting it in third place behind DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike Global Offensive.

KOTK debuted on Steam 12 months ago after H1Z1 was broken down into two separate chunks, H1Z1: Just Survive which features lots of zombies and survival, and H1Z1: King of the Kill, which was solely the "battle royale" mode. It launched well, but then the player-based drifted away.

Still, in September, Daybreak launched a massive update that updated the user interface and in-game economy, brought in a range of regional servers, wiped characters and added Native Twitch support. It was a big shift, but it seems to have paid off. While before KOTK was struggling to hit 10,000 concurrent players, now it’s eying up 100,000, hitting six figures for the first time recently.

VentureBeat broke the story, and you can read more analysis there.