PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is Steam's most-played game
Concurrent player count for survival shooter hits 877k, tops Valve's own Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
It was a big weekend for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, as Bluehole's breakout hit saw the conclusion of the ESL Gamescom PUBG Invitational tournament and reached a new milestone to boot.
On Saturday morning, the game's creative director Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene tweeted that the game had surpassed 800,000 concurrent players on Valve's Steam storefront, sandwiched between a pair of Valve-developed evergreen hits on the service, Dota 2 (839,000 players at the time) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (538,000 players). By Sunday morning, Greene's game had climbed ahead of Dota 2, 878,000 concurrent players to 843,000 concurrent players.
Battlegrounds has been in uncharted territory for non-Valve games on Steam for some time already. Last month, Greene tweeted a game-by-game list of highest record player counts on Steam. Battlegrounds' record at the time of 481,000 players was already the third-best ever, and the highest for a non-Valve game with Fallout 4 the next best at 472,000. This weekend may have moved Battlegrounds into second place all-time ahead of Counter-Strike, which as of last month had a record of 850,000 peak concurrent users.
Battlegrounds still has a ways to go before it can claim the all-time record (held by Dota 2, which drew 1.29 million players in March of 2016), but if it somehow kept growing as it has during the summer, it would surpass that mark next month.