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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds hits 4m sales, $100m revenue

Update: Bluehole Inc's breakout hit reached a peak of 230,000 concurrent users

Bluehole Inc's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has now sold 4 million units, further proving its credentials as the breakout hit of the year so far.

Brendan Greene, the game's creative director, announced the new milestone on Twitter yesterday, highlighting the fact that it had reached 4 million sales after just three months.

Released in late March, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds made a very strong start, earning $11 million in revenue after three days on Steam. It reached 1 million sales in less than three weeks, and crossed 2 million after six weeks.

The game's popularity has even been used for the good of humanity, when a PUBG Charity Invitational generated $223,000 in proceeds for the charity Gamers Outreach.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in April, Greene said he intends to take PUBG out of Early Access in around six months, thanks in part to its Korean publisher, Bluehole Inc.

"We're going to do this in six months because we have a team that are committed - and they're Korean, so there's honour involved," he said. "The management trusts us. We're somewhat autonomous: we still have to give them reports, but we do what we want to do. The launch was vindication of that. With our success now, it's shown that it is possible."

At Microsoft's E3 press conference, PUBG was revealed as a "console launch exclusive" for Xbox. It will hit the system's Preview Program before the end of the year.

Update: Bluehole Inc. has confirmed that PUBG earned more than $100 million in revenue since it launched on Steam Early Access on March 23.

"PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has attracted players from around the world with 24% of them based in the US, 19% in China, 6% in Germany, 6% in Russia and 4% in the U.K.," the company said. "The game has seen further popularity in Eastern Asia with 5.5% of its players in South Korea and 4.3% in Japan, making for impressive sales as compared to their overall population pool."

At peak times, PUBG is played by 230,000 concurrent users on Steam and watched by 350,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch.

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Matthew Handrahan

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Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.