PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Mobile hit 100 million downloads some four months after launching on the Google Play Store in the West, Tencent and PUBG Corporation said Thursday, clarifying that the figure doesn’t include markets in China, Japan, and South Korea where the hit battle royale game was available beforehand. The Android and iOS title originally became globally available on March 19 but neither its developer nor publisher clarified how many installs did it amass after mid-July.
Excluding the aforementioned markets, PUBG Mobile presently has over fourteen million daily active players and is still one of the most popular Android games in many parts of the world. Within its first week of availability, the online multiplayer title topped mobile game download charts in over 100 countries and was the fastest app to do so in history. While its fierce free-to-play rival Fortnite presently enjoys a larger player base across all platforms, it’s unlikely to outperform it in the mobile segment due to the fact that Epic Games unexpectedly opted to circumvent the Google Play Store with the Android release of its battle royale hit, citing a desire to be closer to its community of players, as well as belief that Google’s 30-percent cut of all app revenues is too high for what’s being offered in return. And even though the implications of that move are likely to be extremely far-reaching, PUBG Mobile’s lead in the battle royale market for Android is unlikely to erode in the immediate future.
The newly reported download milestone doesn’t include PUBG Mobile Lite, a reworked version of the portable game for low-powered Android smartphones and tablets which Tencent released just earlier this week. That particular title managed to hit at least 50,000 downloads within its first 24 hours of market availability, according to the game’s Google Play Store listing. The latest version of PUBG mobile can be downloaded by referring to the banner below.