Mentioned in this article Games: Dota 2, Fortnite

PUBG has seen a 44.7% decrease in average players for the first half of 2018.

The game’s decline is closely linked to Fortnite’s rise in popularity.

Despite the drop in active users, PUBG remains the most played game on Steam.

PLAYERUNKOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS was the gaming success story of 2017. However, since the new year, PUBG has seen a significant decline in its player base.

According to SteamCharts, PUBG had 1.584M average players—the highest in the game’s history—in January of 2018. Since then, the game’s average player base has dropped month after month, falling to 876K in May. In total, PUBG has seen a 44.7% decrease in average players for the first days of 2018. PUBG is seeing a mass exodus of its player base and those users seem to be heading to the game’s biggest competitor: Fortnite .

Epic Games launched Fortnite’s free-to-play battle royale mode on September 26, 2017. While PUBG continued to grow in 2017, its growth started to slow down shortly after Fortnite’s battle royale update.

From July to October 2017, PUBG saw month-over-month growth over 64%. In November, the first full month after the release of Fortnite‘s battle royale mode, the growth slowed to 22.78%, finally stalling out at 10.36% growth in January 2018. Notably, January was also the last month that PUBG saw higher viewership than Fortnite on Twitch.

In active players and viewership, Fortnite has fully eclipsed PUBG, and that trend continues into esports. PUBG was the first of the two to announce developer support for esports, offering a $2M prize pool for the PUBG Global Invitational 2018. Last week, Fortnite shattered yearly esports prize money records with its $100M announcement.

PUBG Corp has felt the sting of Fortnite’s rise to power and seems ready to fight for the throne. The company recently filed a lawsuit against Epic Games for copyright infringement

While it is no longer the jewel of the games industry, PUBG is still an extremely popular game. It has remained a top title in Twitch viewership month after month, earning the fourth-most hours watched last week. While 800K players may be a significant drop, its still nearly 400K more Dota 2 , than the second most played game on Steam.

The question for PUBG now is if the game can stabilize through its content updates and esports initiatives, or if players will continue to trade in PUBG’s parachutes and frying pans for Fortnite’s gliders and pickaxes.