A number of unknown players are quitting "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" ("PUBG") as the Steam charts of the most popular battle-royale game right now indicates a drop in the player count for the first time ever.
Over the previous month, or the last 30 days, it seems "PUBG's" concurrent player count has dropped by as much as 2.22 percent, which brings it down from 1.584 million players concurrently to 1.549 million, which is still quite an impressive number. This significant decline of players was seen during the first week of February.
As such, it could be a sign that "PUBG" has reached the peak of its popularity and there may not be new players anymore as suggested by Game Debate. Though the recent giant ban wave that the developers did on cheaters may have also been a factor in the decrease of the concurrent player count. Reports indicated that the game's anti-cheat component banned over one-million players in January alone, and this may have dissuaded some cheaters or other gamers to continue playing "PUBG."
Meanwhile, "PUBG's" sales in China, its biggest market right now, has halted for two months, probably because a lot of Chinese players are awaiting the localized version of the game to be published by the Chinese company Tencent. A graph from Steam also shows a slight decline in the Chinese concurrent players of "PUBG," but since there are millions of players in the said country, any slight trend is actually quite a significant number and could affect the percentages.
Other reasons that could have been attributed to the drop in player count is the new desert map Miramar, which has received quite a lot of disdain from the community, mostly due to how it lacks cover compared with the Mediterranean map Erangel. Right now, there is still no way to pick a map, meaning players will have to endure randomly picking Miramar 50 percent of the time.
Otherwise, it could be simply that the game has been around for a really long time and players may already be getting tired of it.
