PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has sold more than 10 million copies. One Twitch analytics site has it overtaking Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, and other top games in the livestreaming arena. And it even passed Valve’s own Dota 2 on its own Steam platform, hitting 1 million concurrent players for the first time on September 8.
Other games are adding Battle Royale modes. But as we transition from the slow summer season, which Battlegrounds easily ruled as it became an industry phenomenon, we look at what games could cut into its lead — or knock it out of its top spot.
The first contender is, of course, Destiny 2. Activision and Bungie’s online shooter is thriving in its first weeks on consoles, and it’s coming October 24. But some players (a small group, mind you) are already complaining about bumping up to the endgame and running out of things to do, just eight days after its release.
What about Star Wars: Battlefront 2? It promises a strong single-player campaign to go along with multiplayer starship dogfighting the likes we haven’t seen since 1997’s X-wing vs. TIE Fighter. Could it threaten PUBG?
Or the multiplayer shooter king of them all, Call of Duty? With WWII, we could see Sledgehammer’s back-to-the-old-school shooter carve into Battlegrounds, too.
I’m looking forward to seeing if Battlegrounds has the legs to take on gaming’s biggest names during its biggest season. If it can hold on to a sizable portion of its audience — or even grow — during the noisy fall, then PUBG would’ve made its biggest news yet.
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—Jason Wilson, GamesBeat managing editor
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