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Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Has Not Had Any Impact on PUBG’s Player Base on Steam

Activision's Popular New Take on the Battle Royale Genre isn’t Turning Out to Be a PUBG Killer Yet

October 15, 2018 by

Many believed that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 would put the nail in the coffin of PUBG with it being the first fully-polished triple-A franchise to shift focus its focus to the battle royale genre.

But since the launch of the latest Black Ops on Friday, that hasn’t been the case just yet… and unlike Epic Games’ Fortnite, Activision’s new shooter doesn’t seem to be stealing away the player base of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Even with Black Ops 4 being one of the most well-received Call of Duty games in years and the most watched game on Twitch over the weekend with top streamers like Ninja, Shroud, and Dr Disrespect all playing it, this year’s CoD hasn’t had an impact on PUBG’s player base on Steam.

Over the course of this weekend’s Black Ops 4 launch, PUBG only saw a 4% decline in players when comparing its average concurrent players on Steam to last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

PUBG’s decrease of only 24k players this past weekend was actually less of a decline than prior weeks, and far lower than some of its worst months such as back in May 2018 when the player base dropped by over 20%.

With Call of Duty surprisingly not stealing away PUBG’s player base, it’ll be interesting to see how long the hype can last for the new shooter. Having top streamers promote the game helped Black Ops 4 crush last year’s Call of Duty: WWII on Twitch with a peak of 367k more viewers.

But how long can Black Ops 4’s new “Blackout” mode keep the attention of players and streamers? We’ve seen many other popular BR games recently make big entrances, only to quickly fade away into obscurity as players lose interest and move on to the potential next big thing.

And as we’ve seen in previous years, interest in Call of Duty always tends to not last long with each game having a huge decline in players right after launch. Sadly, Activision made the disappointing decision to not release Black Ops 4 on Steam this year — preventing GitHyp and the public from knowing its true player counts.

But while Black Ops 4’s player base is uncertain, it’s now clear that the latest Call of Duty has not become the PUBG killer many predicted it would be. And with Call of Duty becoming far more popular than Battlefield V this year, EA and Dice’s take on the BR genre also won’t likely have a huge impact on PUBG next month.