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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds overtook Dota 2 for concurrent players last night

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds overtook Dota 2 for concurrent players last night

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More than 800,000 players at the same time

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Photo: Bluehole

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds reached a new milestone last night: it had more than 800,000 players online at the same time on Steam, briefly beating out Valve’s own Dota 2.

The game is pretty simple: a hundred people parachute onto a giant map, locate weapons, and proceed to kill one another. The last person standing wins. It’s also been steadily growing in popularity since it landed on Steam’s Early Access in March, and ranked fourth on Steam’s list of most concurrent players ever in July. This new high yesterday makes it only the third game to hit that number, behind Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2.

Notably, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds then went on to beat out Dota 2 last night, something that doesn’t happen all that often, according to SteamSpy and SteamDB. That milestone didn’t come without a cost: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds servers went down this morning.

That’s not bad for a game that’s technically not out or even finished yet — it’s slated to launch as an Xbox One exclusive later this year. But hitting that number of players and briefly surpassing the enormously popular Dota 2 is a solid indication that its popularity has nowhere to go but up.