PUBG Sees 486% Growth In Players After It Switches To Free-To-Play

The once pop­u­lar bat­tle royale game PUBG recent­ly went through a busi­ness mod­el adjust­ment, and decid­ed to go free-to-play. This switch has proven to be rather suc­cess­ful, with the devel­op­er Krafton announc­ing that the game saw a 486% increase in new play­ers dur­ing the first week after the change.

That growth rate exceeds PUB­G’s ini­tial launch back in 2017. Krafton also men­tioned that this growth was even high­er (537%) in cer­tain regions of the world like the Com­mon­wealth of Inde­pen­dent States, South­east Asia, and South America.

At its peak, PUBG reached 690,000 total “active” play­ers on Steam as part of the tran­si­tion. Play­ers are also spend­ing more time on PUBG, with the aver­age play­time jump­ing more than 100% on PC on con­sole com­pared to the week before the free-to-play tran­si­tion. PlaySta­tion, specif­i­cal­ly, saw a 400% increase in aver­age play­time, Krafton detailed.

To cel­e­brate these achieve­ments, Krafton is giv­ing away spe­cial in-game rewards for those who play PUBG for at least an hour between 4 PM PT / 7 PM ET on Jan­u­ary 27 and 3:59 PM PT / 6:59 PM ET on Jan­u­ary 30. Play­ers who log in between now and Feb­ru­ary 17th will get the Orbital Van­guard skins.

Pri­or to the free-to-play change, PUGB sold more than 75 mil­lion copies across con­soles and PC.