PUBG mobile has as many players as Fortnite

The mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds now has just as many players as Fortnite at over 200 million users, the company told The Verge today. Both games now have around 30 million daily active users.

• (PUBG was also named best game of the year in Google Play. But Fortnite, whose parent company pulled out of the Google Play store in August in favor of distributing the app itself, was never eligible for that matchup.)

• Bloomberg reported that Fortnite hit the 200 million player mark by November 26th, so it is possible that more have started the game since then. But the PUBG number notably excludes China, meaning that it actually likely exceeds Fortnite in popularity if everything was tallied up. It also doesn’t include the more than 50 million copies sold of the paid version of PUBG on console and PC.

In China, where consoles were notably banned for fifteen years until 2015, much of the population still isn’t accustomed to console gaming and prefers mobile or PC games instead. And with an appetite for first-person shooters, many were quick to latch onto PUBG, which arrived on mobile before Fortnite.