Now PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds hits 20m

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has joined Fortnite in the 20m sales club.

Creator Brendan Greene’s tweet dropped in the fact that the game hit the milestone at the weekend, just to be sure we all know that it wasn’t beaten to the punch by Epic’s Fortnite, which also hit 20m this weekend.

Of course, it must be remembered that Fortnite: Battle Royale is a free-to-play game, while PUBG costs £26.99.

The rate of growth for PUBG continues to impress. Having sold 1m copies sold in its first 16 days and 2m less than a month later, it then struck 4m in its first three months. It reached 8m just two months later and 10m after just over five months on the market.

Since then it added another 2m in two weeks, another 3m in the four weeks after that and 7m in the following five weeks. In all the 20m mark has been passed in under eight months, doubling its sales number in the last two months alone.

And PUBG continues to post some epic concurrent player numbers – Steamcharts puts its peak in the last 24 hours at 2.36m, with an all-time peak of 2.52m, which is a Steam record.

https://twitter.com/PLAYERUNKNOWN/status/927933164550541313

Greene’s tweet references a growing perception among the user base about the problem of cheating in-game. How widespread the issue is remains a matter of debate, but certainly instances of foul play are on the up.

“We would like to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the cheaters and we are sorry that you have not been able to enjoy PUBG in a safe and fair environment,” a recent dev update explained. “Our development team is doing their best to detect and ban those who use cheats in a more proactive manner. We are aware that we still have much to do. We will use all available resources to combat cheaters and foster a safe and fair in-game environment. We will also continue to take actions against those who develop and distribute cheats.

“We are in the process of adopting new tools to detect and verify users with unusual gameplay patterns and today, we will be rolling out additional measures. We will continue to permanently ban those who are using cheats.”