PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds hits 1m Early Access sales

The PC games scene has been taken aback by another surprise hit – PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Battlegrounds in an online multiplayer last man standing survival shooter with similarities to games such as DayZ and H1Z1’s Battle Royale mode. However, while the famous zombie shooter took around four weeks to hit a million, Battlegrounds has done so in half the time – reaching 1m Steam sales in its first 16 days.

It has now topped the Steam charts for two weeks, too, while also consistently remaining in the top three concurrent user charts, with a peak of 89k simultaneous players.

In additional, it has also hit 150 concurrent Twitch viewers with over 2k streamers playing the game every day, creating around 40k streams between them.

We couldn’t have reached this milestone without the dedication of our players and we are truly humbled by their passionate response,” creator Brendan Greene said. As we move to make improvements and deliver new content we will actively engage this growing fan base.”

Battlegrounds drops players in an 8×8 kilometre island. Everyone starts with nothing, and must scavenge resources to conquer their opponents. It’s a genre that has become extremely popular in recent years.

I’ve always wanted to create a standalone game based on the mod I created for the ARMA series, and working with [developer] Bluehole gives me the resources and creative freedom to build the experience I’ve always envisioned,” Greene said previously.

We have a great development team in place, and our goal is to create a realistic open world experience with the deep gameplay and strong combat mechanics.”

Bluehole’s production director Chang Han Kim added: As huge fans of Battle Royale, our Bluehole team shares PlayerUnknown’s vision of strategic combat driven by player tactics in dynamic battlegrounds.”